He muttered an incoherent apology, and fervently hoped that she had not observed the direction of his gaze. A vain hope, seeing that she was a woman!
"Better get safe into the card-room before I do anything worse!" he added uneasily. "I'll be back for number five. Trust me not to forget."
As he crossed the barn of a room,—lavishly draped with bazaar bunting, and starred with radiating bayonets,—his eyes lighted on Kenneth Malcolm, the Engineer subaltern, whose current of courtship had been checked by Maurice's arrival on the scene:—a boy of stalwart build; his straight features and well-poised head justifying the sobriquet of Apollo, bestowed upon him by an effusive admirer, whose sole reward had been a cordial detestation. He leaned against the wall, absently twirling the cord of his programme; his attention centred on a corner of the room, where Elsie Mayhew—an incarnate moonbeam of a girl—was critically examining the pattern on her fan, while Maurice possessed himself of her programme, and sprinkled it liberally with the letter M. In the boy's bottled-up resentment Lenox saw a reflection of his own; and the fact moved him to scorn rather than sympathy.
"Damned idiots, both of us!" he reflected savagely. "A couple of dogs whose bones have been confiscated, and we haven't even the pluck to snarl."
The opening valse struck up as he reached the cardroom. Without looking directly at his wife, he saw Garth's arm encircle her waist, saw him hold her thus, for an appreciable moment, before starting; and sat down to the whist table with murder in his heart.
At number five he re-entered the ballroom to claim Honor Desmond for his 'batch' of dances, and to take her, as he had said, right away from it all. She found him little inclined for talk; yet none the less quick to appreciate her understanding of his mood.
"Thank you for bearing with me," he said, as they parted in one of the many doorways opening on to the long verandah. "I won't come in. I am in the humour for the profound philosophies of tobacco and the stars."
"Better companions than a mere woman!" she answered, smiling into the gravity of his eyes. "Don't deny it. I have no taste for lip service."
"Nor I the smallest gift for it. Still, truth is truth; and a good deal depends on the quality of—the mere woman."
She vouchsafed him the stateliest shadow of a curtsey.