"Was that a concession for my sake?"
"It's for Jennie's sake. It's her happiness I'm thinking about. You've nothing to do with it."
"Except to provide his credentials," I thought, but said nothing.
I begin to like it less and less. Not one single thing about it did I like. Julia was supposed not to know this Arnaud, but that had not prevented her from thrusting herself into his affairs and lying unblushingly about an appointment at the Golf Club seven miles away at nine o'clock in the morning. And if Madge thought that Julia and Jennie were "behaving with ordinary decency" at that moment, so did not I. As for Derry, honestly I was afraid of him. He had had a whole night in which to think over the almost certain consequences of that surprise among the sarrasin stooks, and if he was caught without a plan he was not the man I took him for. Julia might think she had scored during that hour and a half when he had shown her his pictures, but the change was just as likely to be in his pocket. Probably he had expected that that bicycle would be sent for before the day was many hours old. The only thing he could not have expected was that Julia Oliphant would come in person for it.
Then the dance ended, and Julia, as barefaced as she was barearmed, came straight up to me, wide-smiling, daring.
"Well, George! Good morning! Enjoying yourself?"
"Hadn't Derry a nerve!" she had said to me when I had told her about the tea-party at Ker Annic. I don't think his nerve surpassed her own. I looked straight at her.
"Since it's good morning, come for a turn," I said.
Still smiling all over her face, she placed a resplendent arm on mine, and we passed out on to the terrace.
She wore an immense white hat, so cavalierly dragged down on one side and so arrogantly jutting up on the other that from certain points you had to walk half way round her before you saw her face at all. One eye lurked permanently within the recess of that outrageous brim. She had also done something to her lips.