“They are very particular, very strict about hours,” she answered, casting wildly about for the rope that even now seemed to dangle just out of her reach, “and—and—dreadful, agonizing as it is to part thus, I must not—now of all times—do anything to alienate my only friends.”
He had lifted his head to make his protest, and she had nimbly taken advantage of the fact to slide eel-like away from him, and make for the door. He was there before her. But just as he reached it the mahogany portal swung open, and in the aperture stood a tranquil black form.
“If you please, sir, Mrs. Tancred wished me to say that she hoped you would stay to luncheon.”
There was a moment’s pause while the full bathos of the situation made itself felt. Then civilization resumed her sway, the primæval instincts retired into the background, and the unfortunate Toby, averting his hideously disfigured face, and swallowing his last sob, answered thickly—
“Oh, thanks very much, but I am afraid I am engaged.”
This, however, in one sense was just what he was not.
CHAPTER XXIV
“She would, I should think, be glad if you let her have luncheon sent up to her.”
“I have no opinion of food eaten in bedrooms. If people are well enough to eat, they are well enough to come downstairs; but she is probably not fit to be seen, so for once I will relax my rule.”
These two remarks, to which it would be superfluous to assign their respective ownerships, were all the comment upon the recent melodrama at first possible to the reluctant managers upon whose stage it had been played. They ate their luncheon in ruffled silence.