“Well!” she returned.
“Just home from a party, are you? Where’s father?”
She put her finger to her lips, and indicated the closed library door with a slight movement of the head.
“He’s writing a speech or something. He had a stenographer come up right after dinner. I was de trop, so I have been waiting all this time for you to come home and amuse me. And you are very, very late, you bad boy.”
He followed her into the reception room, a place rendered comfortless by the decorator and furnisher, and Mrs. Craighill resumed her seat in the least forbidding of its chairs. She suffered Wayne to mitigate its severe lines with pillows.
“There are better loafing places in the house,” he observed, as he sat down opposite her and felt for his cigarette case.
“No smoking! You can’t get it out of these draperies.”
“You’ll have to this time.” He dropped the match stick into a Sevres urn at his elbow and looked her over.
“The Colonel’s been at it ever since dinner?”
“Since eight-thirty by the stair clock.”