She flushed nervously.
“Already?” she asked, with a laugh.
“Yes. I read it at a sitting.” He paused. “I wanted to tell you that I like it. I like it more than I can——” Again he stopped, and Cecily looked at him, surprised and touched. Robert, who was always so fluent! That Robert should stammer and hesitate meant much.
Impulsively she put out her hand. “Really? I’m so glad,” she began, softly.
“Mr. Mayne,” said the maid’s voice suddenly, and Robert dropped the hand he had the previous moment eagerly taken.
“That you, Mayne? You’ll excuse me—I must get to work,” he said, making towards the door at which Mayne had just entered.
He had seen his wife’s eyes go past him and brighten as they fell upon her visitor, and he closed his study door with a bang.
CHAPTER XVII
THE weeks that followed were difficult weeks for Robert. Cecily’s book was a success in so far that from the artist’s standpoint it attracted just the right sort of attention. It was praised by just the half-dozen critics whose opinion Robert held to be valuable; the critics whose good opinion he had secretly never ceased to covet, even while he consciously strayed into the broad path which leads to popular success and literary destruction.
But in her own immediate circle, comprising as it did many people whose chief interests were connected with the world of books, Cecily’s success was immediate and strikingly apparent. Already popular as a charming as well as a pretty woman, it needed only the added distinction of having written a novel that was discussed at length in the Quarterlies to make her openly courted. Robert never saw her nowadays. It had come to be tacitly understood that “the Kingslakes went their separate ways,” and invitations in which he was not included were showered upon his wife. The first party for several weeks to which they went together was one given in June by Lady Wilmot.