Then she stood, half leaning against the embrasure, gazing moodily across the river.
Certainly she was fetchingly pretty. As if you had looked at her through one of the very weak reducing-glasses illustrators use in order to see how their work will diminish, so her features had not only a special smallness, but somehow a special brightness of their own as well. The slight neck was white as a bluebell stalk; the faint flower-like stippling that never quite broke through into avowed freckles reminded you of a rubbed old miniature that might have been painted, not on ivory, but on a lamina of pale gold; and her inordinate hair lighted up the whole casement angle. But she was perturbed about something. She watched a string of lighters drift down with the tide, and then, without turning her head, said, “Dorothy——”
Dorothy, who had been once more searching among the scattered papers, rose from her knees. She held a piece of paper in her hand. “Got it!” she cried triumphantly. “I knew I’d left it here.... What?”
“Have you heard about Aunt Jerry?”
“Thank goodness I haven’t trailed all the way from Oxford Street for nothing!... Aunt Jerry? No. What about her?”
“She’s going to be married.”
Ordinarily Dorothy Lennard’s blue eyes were wide, receptive rounds; in moments of surprise they always seemed to open to twice their size. They did so now.
“No!... Oh, my dear, do tell me, quick.”
“Mr. Massey, at the boarding-house.”
“Mr.——? Not the safety-valve?” she cried.