Sir Ronald, with a dark flush on his face, bowed stiffly, in silence, and moved away.
Doctor Frank was introduced, made his bow, and retreated to Rose's sofa.
Capricious womanhood! Rose, that morning, had decidedly snubbed him; Rose, at noon, welcomed him with her most radiant smile. Never, perhaps, in all his experience had any young lady listened to him with such flattering attention, with such absorbed interest. Never had bright eyes and rosy lips given him such glances and smiles. She hung on his words; she had eyes and ears for no one else, least of all for the supremely handsome gentleman who was her sister's betrothed, and who talked to her father; while Sir Ronald glowered over a book.
The ringing of the luncheon-bell brought Grace and Eeny, and all were soon seated around the Captain's hospitable board.
Lieutenant Reginald Stanford laid himself out to be fascinating, and was fascinating. There was a subtle charm in his handsome face, in his brilliant smile and glance, in his pleasant voice, in his wittily-told stories, and inexhaustible fund of anecdote and mimicry. Now he was in Ireland, now in France, now in Scotland, now in Yorkshire; and the bad English and the patois and accent of all were imitated to the life. With that face, that voice, that talent for imitation, Lieutenant Stanford, in another walk of life, might have made his fortune on the stage. His power of fascination was irresistible. Grace felt it, Eeny felt it, all felt it, except Sir Ronald Keith. He sat like the Marble Guest, not fascinated, not charmed, black and unsmiling.
Rose, too—what was the matter with Rose? She, so acutely alive to well-told stories, to handsome faces, so rigidly cold, and stately, and uninterested now. She shrugged her dimpled shoulders when the table was in a roar; she opened her rather small hazel eyes and stared, as if she wondered, what they could see to laugh at. She did not even deign to glance at him, the hero of the feast; and, in fact, so greatly overdid her part as to excite the suspicions of that astute young man, Doctor Danton. There is no effect without a cause. What was the cause of Rose's icy indifference? He looked at her, then at Stanford, then back at her, and set himself to watch.
"She has met him before," thought the shrewd Doctor; "but where, if he has just come from England? I'll ask him, I think."
It was some time before there was a pause in the conversation. In the first, Dr. Frank struck in.
"How did you come, Mr. Stanford?" he asked.
"On the Hysperia, from Southampton to New York."