The squire make a quick impatient movement. Mr. Wynnstay looked significantly at his wife, who dropped her eyeglass with a little irrepressible smile.
As for Robert, leaning forward with hastened breath, it seemed to him that his eyes and the squire's crossed like swords. In Robert's mind there had arisen a sudden passion of antagonism. Before his eyes there was a vision of a child in a stifling room, struggling with mortal disease, imposed upon her, as he hotly reminded himself, by this man's culpable neglect. The dinner-party, the splendour of the room, the conversation, excited a kind of disgust in him. If it were not for Catherine's pale face opposite, he could hardly have maintained his self-control.
Mrs. Darcy, a little bewildered, and feeling that things were not going particularly well, thought it best to interfere.
'Roger,' she said plaintively, 'you must not be so philosophical. It's too hot! He used to talk like that,' she went on, bending over to Mr. Wynnstay, 'to the French priests who came to see us last winter in Paris. They never minded a bit—they used to laugh. "Monsieur votre frère, madame, c'est un homme qui a trop lu," they would say to me when I gave them their coffee. Oh, they were such dears, those old priests! Roger said they had great hopes of me.'
The chatter was welcome, the conversation broke up. The squire turned to Lady Charlotte, and Rose to Langham.
'Why didn't you support Robert?' she said to him, impulsively, with a dissatisfied face. 'He was alone, against the table!'
'What good should I have done him?' he asked, with a shrug. 'And pray, my lady confessor, what enthusiasms do you suspect me of?'
He looked at her intently. It seemed to her they were by the gate again—the touch of his lips on her hand. She turned from him hastily to stoop for her fan which had slipped away. It was only Catherine who, for her annoyance, saw the scarlet flush leap into the fair face. An instant later Mrs. Darcy had given the signal.