“If Colin can come, we’ll just take it quietly; golf all day and go to bed early. A fortnight of that will soon pick me up. Later on in the summer we’ll go for a holiday together.”
“Very well.”
He went towards the door again, and Claudia picked up a light wrap for her shoulders. She would be rather late for Frank’s dinner-party.
At the door he fidgeted with the handle and finally turned to her. “Perhaps I did forget to tell Marsh, Claudia. Smooth him over, will you? You’re good at that kind of thing. Tell him that—er—I’ve come to the conclusion that—he didn’t hear me.”
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask him why he did not tell Marsh himself. Then she remembered her newborn resolution, and let him go his own road.
“I’ll see what I can do in the morning. Good-night, Gilbert.”
CHAPTER XVII
THE GREAT THRESHOLD
The small dining-room of Frank’s studio-flat had that cosy, friendly air that only a small room can achieve. That there was little more space than was occupied by the table laid for four only seemed to increase the pleasantness of the apartment, which was lit by four red candles in old pewter candlesticks on the table. Their red shades confined the circle of light to the white tablecloth, and allowed the rest of the room to appear pleasantly soft and vague. An enormous bowl of red roses filled the centre of the table, and some of their broken petals were scattered over the cloth, while an Eastern scarf of some filmy material shading from orange to blood-red was loosely disposed with an air of artistic negligence around the centre bowl.