"Perhaps it's like a hungry boy in a goody-shop. He wants to eat them all."
"Were you so very solitary as a child?" he asked her, gently, in a changed tone, which was itself an act of homage, almost a caress.
"Yes--I was very solitary," she said, after a pause. "And I am really gregarious--dreadfully fond of people!--and curious about them. And I think, oddly enough, papa was too."
A question rose naturally to his lips, but was checked unspoken. He well remembered Mr. Mallory at Portofino; a pleasant courteous man, evidently by nature a man of the world, interested in affairs and in literature, with all the signs on him of the English governing class. It was certainly curious that he should have spent all those years in exile with his child, in a remote villa on the Italian coast. Health, Marsham supposed, or finance--the two chief motives of life. For himself, the thought of Diana's childhood between the pine woods and the sea gave him pleasure; it added another to the poetical and romantic ideas which she suggested. There came back on him the plash of the waves beneath the Portofino headland, the murmur of the pines, the fragrance of the underwood. He felt the kindred between all these, and her maidenly energy, her unspoiled beauty.
"One moment!" he said, as they began to cross the lawn. "Has my sister attacked you yet?"
The smile with which the words were spoken could be heard though not seen. Diana laughed, a little awkwardly.
"I am afraid Mrs. Fotheringham thinks me a child of blood and thunder! I am so sorry!"
"If she presses you too hard, call me in. Isabel and I understand each other."
Diana murmured something polite.
Mr. Frobisher meanwhile came to meet them with a remark upon the beauty of the evening, and Alicia Drake followed.