"Isn't. I didn't bring one," she airily explained. "I didn't bring anybody. I hate being driven, I like to do things for myself. I've come to see the aeroplanes, you know. I told you I should!"
She stuck her hands in her pockets and propped her slim shoulders against the wall, looking up with a naughty and audacious tilt of the chin. "Here I am and you can't get rid of me!" she seemed to say.
Denis did not want her in the least. It was two o'clock, and humanity constrained him to ask her to lunch; there was not an inn for miles where she could get a meal, if he didn't, and she must actually have seen his cold beef on the table. But Denis was an Irishman, with strict ideas of propriety. Dorothea, not for the first time, had forgotten her part; while posing as a young girl, she claimed the freedom of a married woman. Reading her mistake in his face, she was quick to seize the bull by the horns.
"I suppose I've no business here, and I know you don't want me, but I'm not going back now till I've seen everything!" she announced; and then, melting into the wheedling, insinuating smile of a child: "You can look on me as a man and a brother, or you can count me as business—I am—I don't care what you do, only do forgive me, and do, do, do ask me to lunch, for I'm so hungry!"
Denis smiled too, though stiffly, making the best of it. "I shall be very pleased to show you the place, Miss O'Connor, but it's a pity you've come to-day, for you'll not see any flyin'. The men are all home, you know."
"Why, I came on purpose because I thought Sunday was the day!"
"It isn't with us."
Dorothea was subdued. She did not ask why, but meekly reëntered the room. The partners had divided the house between them, and this was Denis's den, corresponding to Wandesforde's across the passage. Wandesforde, though he lived in town and was only a casual visitor at Dent-de-lion, had made himself extremely comfortable; Denis had brought his old furniture from Bredon and dumped it in the room, just as it was. There were two sash windows, filled with small panes. Under one stood a table as big as a four-poster, covered with papers. Denis could lay his hand on any packet in the dark; but when papers are in order, unfortunately it does not follow that they are tidy. In the middle of the floor stood a second table, just large enough to take Denis's plate and the cold beef. Beside the fireplace, which had a marbled wooden mantelpiece, stood a pair of leathern arm-chairs, once plum-colored, now seamed with white cracks, and with every spring broken. The walls were covered with drab paper, fading to yellow, there was a square of drab drugget on the floor, and the ceiling was drab also, from ancient lamp smoke. Dorothea thought in passing that it was the ugliest room she had ever been in, but she, like Denis, was highly indifferent to her surroundings.
But she was by no means indifferent to her host; she thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen, an opinion held by other young ladies before her, though Denis's looks were not at all in the style of the barber's block. He was just under six feet in height, lightly built and light in movement, all bone and sinew. His face was thin too, a little pinched at the temples, a little hollow in the cheeks, with dark brows, dark hair, and a white skin which burnt biscuit-brown, not red. Irish coloring and deep-set, dark blue Irish eyes, "put in with a dirty finger" under their long soft lashes. The lower part of the face, nose and lips and chin, was most delicately modeled, fine, high-bred, rather ascetic in type. In short, he was as handsome as a paladin, à fendre le cœur, and so purely indifferent to the fact, one way or the other, that Lettice when she poked her soft fun at him got no more than an absent-minded smile. No rises were to be had in that quarter. But Dorothea was not given to poking fun at people; she planted her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, adoring his looks, hanging breathless on his words, divided in admiration between his person and his profession—and how those great eyes of hers could lighten and glow! They were not the same eyes, she was not the same girl who had poured out her lightnings on Harry Gardiner.