CHAPTER XXVI
Mr. Ember, having completed all his arrangements, went in search of Lady Heritage. She had sat silently through lunch and disappeared directly afterwards. Having failed to find her downstairs, Ember was about to pass along the upper corridor to the steel gate which shut off the north wing, when he noticed that the door of the small Oak Room on his left was standing ajar. He thought he heard a movement within, and, after pausing for a moment to listen, he pushed the door wide and looked in. As far as his knowledge went, Lady Heritage had never entered this room during the time that they had been in the house. He accepted the fact and could have stated the reasons for it. It had been the playroom, and the walls were covered with Anthony Luttrell’s school groups. The book shelves held his books, the cabinets his collections. In a very intimate sense it was his room.
Raymond Heritage stood at the far end of it now. She wore a dress of soft white wool bound with a plaited girdle from the ends of which heavy tassels swung. She had taken one of the groups from the wall and was looking at it with an intensity which closed her thought to all other impressions. She stood half turned from the door. Ember looked at her and, looking, experienced some strange sensations. This was Raymond Carr-Magnus, a younger, softer, lovelier woman than Raymond Heritage. The curious cold something, like transparent glass or very thin ice, which seemed to wall her from her fellows, was gone. It was as if the ice had dissolved leaving the air misty and tremulous.
The little flame which always burned in him took on brightness and intensity, and a second flame sprang up beside it, a flame that burned to a still white heat of anger because this change, this softening, was for Anthony Luttrell and not for Jeffrey Ember.
There was no sign of emotion, however, in face or expression as he moved slightly and said:
“Are you busy? May I speak to you for a few minutes?”
It was characteristic of Raymond that she did not appear in the least startled. She turned quite slowly, laid the photograph on the open front of the bureau by which she stood, and said:
“Now? Do you want me now?” A softness was in her voice as she spoke, and a dream in her eyes.
Her beauty struck Ember as a thing seen for the first time. He had to use great force to keep his answer on a note of indifference.
“If you can spare the time,” he said.