"Oh no. I am not at all intimate with Lady Kitty."
Cliffe's slight smile, as he followed her into the large drawing-room, died under his mustache. He divined at once the relation between the two, or thought he did.
As for Mary, she caught her last sight of Cliffe, standing bareheaded on the steps of the embassy, his lean distinction, his ugly good looks marking him out from the men around him. Then, as they drove away she was glad that the darkness hid her from Lady Tranmore. For suddenly she could not smile. She was filled with the perception that if Geoffrey Cliffe did not now ask her to marry him, life would utterly lose its savor, its carefully cherished and augmented savor, and youth would abandon her. At the same time she realized that she would have to make a fight of it, with every weapon she could muster.
IX
"Wasn't I expected?" said Darrell, with a chilly smile.
"Oh yes, sir—yes, sir!" said the Ashes' butler, as he looked distractedly round the drawing-room. "I believe her ladyship will be in directly. Will you kindly take a seat?"
The man's air of resignation convinced Darrell that Lady Kitty had probably gone out without any orders to her servants, and had now forgotten all about her luncheon-party—a state of things to which the Hill Street household was, no doubt, well accustomed.
"I shall claim some lunch," he thought to himself, "whatever happens. These young people want keeping in their place. Ah!"
For he had observed, placed on a small easel, the print of Madame de Longueville in costume, and he put up his eye-glass to look at it. He guessed at once that its appearance there was connected with the fancy ball which was now filling London with its fame, and he examined it with some closeness. "Lady Kitty will make a stir in it—no doubt of that!" he said to himself, as he turned away. "She has the keenest flair of them all for what produces an effect. None of the others can touch her—Mrs. Alcot—none of them!"