"For sheer power of vituperation, you are hard to beat," she said. "Well, mater, what have you been doing all day?"
"When you have done railing at each other, you shall hear. I have news of a really exciting character, but I shall not tell it until there is a suitable demand."
Melicent whirled round and clutched her.
"What has happened? Speak instantly! Something nice? Something to take out the taste of that par.?"
"I have heard news and received a visitor: who but Lance Burmester?"
She had no reason to complain of lack of interest in her hearers. They rained questions upon her.
"He is in town for one night only," said she. "Goes down to Ilbersdale to-morrow; so I implored him to come back and dine. He demurred, on the ground that he had two friends with him, whom he could not desert One is a Captain Brooke, a friend picked up in Africa. The other is—guess, Melicent!"
There was a peculiar intonation in her voice.
Melicent looked up quickly, and met a mischievous look; and suddenly colour flooded the girl's face. Quite unexpectedly to herself, she did what she was never wont to do—she blushed; and she felt as though the blush covered her like a garment to the very feet.
The sensation made her furious. Why should she blush? At the memory of a period of her life now so incredibly remote that it seemed like a previous incarnation? She sometimes felt, in the infrequent moments when she recalled her amatory experiences, as though she had merely dreamed the savagery, the bestiality, of her African days; as though she had first awakened to life when her uncle drove her out upon the high heathery Nab that overlooked the moorlands.