"I don't suppose he professes to know anything about English pictures, does he?" asked Lady Barnes with scorn.
"Ach!—I do not propose that Mrs. Barnes entrust him wid dese pictures, Madame. It is now too late."
And the willowy German looked, with a half-repressed smile, at the row of pictures—all staring at the bystander with the same saucer eyes, the same wooden arms, and the same brilliance of modern paint and varnish, which not even the passage of four years since it was applied had been able greatly to subdue.
Lady Barnes lifted shoulders and eyes—a woman's angry protest against the tyranny of knowledge.
"All the same, they are my forbears, my kith and kin," she said, with emphasis. "But of course Mrs. Barnes is mistress here: I suppose she will do as she pleases."
The German stared politely at the carpet. It was now Daphne's turn to shrug. She threw herself into a chair, with very red cheeks, one foot hanging over the other, and the fingers of her hands, which shone with diamonds, tapping the chair impatiently. Her dress of a delicate pink, touched here and there with black, her wide black hat, and the eyes which glowed from the small pointed face beneath it; the tumbling masses of her dark hair as contrasted with her general lightness and slenderness; the red of the lips, the whiteness of the hands and brow, the dainty irregularity of feature: these things made a Watteau sketch of her, all pure colour and lissomeness, with dots and scratches of intense black. Daphne was much handsomer than she had been as a girl, but also a trifle less refined. All her points were intensified—her eyes had more flame; the damask of her cheek was deeper; her grace was wilder, her voice a little shriller than of old.
While the uncomfortable silence which the two women had made around them still lasted, Roger Barnes appeared on the garden steps.
"Hullo! any tea going?" He came in, without waiting for an answer, looked from his mother to Daphne, from Daphne to his mother, and laughed uncomfortably.
"Still bothering about those beastly pictures?" he said as he helped himself to a cup of tea.
"Thank you, Roger!" said Lady Barnes.