'What! and leave your little anatomical specimen lamenting?' cries she ill-naturedly.
He winces.
'I do not know to whom you are alluding. But may not I stay?' with a slight tremble in his voice.
'Of course you may,' replies she cheerfully. 'Who hinders you?—stay by all means!'
He looks confused. He has not the slightest wish to stay. He has only followed his habitual impulse to say what he imagines to be the agreeable thing—an impulse that has already led him into many quagmires, and will lead him into many more.
'I would not be so selfish,' he says with a charming smile of abnegation; 'I know my place better,' with an expressive glance at the back of the disappearing John. And, suiting the action to the word, he disappears too; when she screams after him:
'Give my love to the sack of potatoes and the skeleton!'
By the time that Talbot returns with the cigarette-case the coast is quite clear, and Betty is at liberty to light her cigarette as soon as she pleases; a liberty of which she immediately avails herself.
There is a prospect before them of an unbroken tête-à-tête until eight o'clock. With how deep a joy and elation ought this reflection to fill him! A year ago it would have done so. To-day with how leaden a foot does the stable clock pace from quarter to quarter. And yet there is no lack of talk. He himself, indeed, does not contribute much; but Betty is in a fine flow. She favours him—not for the first time by many—with several unamiable traits in Mr. Harborough's character, with the dreadful things her dearest friend said of her last week—faithfully reported to her by her second dearest—together with various shady particulars in the personal history of both friends. She gives him the latest details of an internecine broil between two ladies, both candidates for the favour of a great personage. She makes some good jokes upon the death of a relation, and the approaching collapse of an intimate acquaintance's reputation; and, in short, dots her i's and crosses her t's, and calls a spade a spade, and enjoys herself famously. And he? He listens in a sort of wonder.
This, then, is what he has for five years sacrificed his career to. This, then—to be alone with this—he has manœuvred for invitations, planned risky rendezvous, abandoned the hope of home's sanctities. A heavy leaden sickness seems to steal over him. He is recalled to the present by a tone of very decided indignation in his lady's voice—his lady, who, by an easy transition, has slipped from scandal to the hardly dearer or less dear subject of clothes.