"Possibly she did! But, according to Sir Thomas—it was the other man who paid!"
"Odd, isn't it? In this world," said the Goblin with her crackling laugh, "the other man invariably pays the bill! And so the young gentleman over there—who is quite remarkably good-looking in the blond Norman style—and who is going to marry Miss Saxham—succeeds to Lord Norwater in—a certain eventuality! May one be permitted to hope, dear Lady Norwater, that Fate and yourself will combine fortuitously, to keep the cousin out of the House of Peers!"
"Rude, ill-bred, horrid woman!" thought Margot, clenching her little teeth to keep back these epithets. "How dare she twit me with—that! How dare—" Then her hot flush sank away and a mist came before her eyes, and she would have fallen, but that Trixie Wastwood jumped up from the sofa and threw about the little figure a kind, supporting arm.
"I've got you! You're not going to faint, Kittums, are you? Forgive us, my dinkie! What pigs we have been!"
"Heckling the tomtit for defending the saffron-crested blackbird! I rather agree with you," admitted Mrs. Charterhouse as Margot freed herself, saying it was nothing, and proudly moved away. "We women are horribly spiteful," continued Cynthia. "Yes, we are spiteful, Lady Wathe! I am perfectly in earnest. What is the reason? Will anything cure us? Do somebody tell me! Colonel Charterhouse would say it is because we eat too much rich food, walk too little, automobile too much, and want some useful work or other to occupy our minds! He is coming here to lunch with me—he was quite touchingly anxious to be invited!" Her beautiful eyes widened as the swing-doors thudded behind three entering masculine figures, "Why, here he is with Lord Norwater, and your boy, Trixie! All three in khaki! What a day we are having!"
She added, as her handsome middle-aged Colonel made his spurred way through the ever-thickening crush to her:
"I am enlightened! So this was your surprise!"
"Not half as big as mine when I found they were willing to take me. 'Fit as a fiddle,' according to the M. O. Gad!"—he went on, as his wife made room for him on the settle by her side—"as willingly as though he had been somebody else's husband," Lady Wathe said subsequently—"It's to my golf I owe it—these A.M.S. sawbones finding me in the pink! And instead of a back-seat, what do you think they've given me? Command of the Third Reserve Battalion of the blessed old Regiment, the Loyal North Linkshires, vice Crowe-Pinckney, kicked out by a gouty toe! ... How's that for an oldster of fifty-five, ... Eh, what?" His chuckle was that of a Fourth Form athlete picked to supply a gap in the School Eleven. And Cynthia's beautiful eyes, as she slipped her hand into the Colonel's, looked at him as the boy's mother's might have looked upon her son.
Lady Wastwood's Pierrot smile might have played upon the reunited couple mockingly, but that the unexpected apparition of her boy Wastwood in single-starred khaki, adorned with the badge of a crack Hussar Regiment, girt with the Sam Browne and narrow officer's shoulder-strap, and clad as to the legs in spurred brown butcher-boots—dimmed her bright green eyes and brought a choke into her throat. Wastwood the son was so like Wastwood the father—killed at Magersfontein in 1900,—whom Trixie, for no reason apparently, had romantically adored. A burly young man, pink as a baby, with thick fair hair growing down within two inches of his eyebrows, small, fierce blue eyes, and a huge roaring voice, softened down now to a tender bellow as he answered a pale girl's eager question with:
"Well, I can't say exactly when we're going to the Front, but I hope to Christmas it'll be soon!"