Her gloom changed to radiancy. She rose up as the tall figure of Sherbrand passed under the portico, and hurried to him, emptying her budget of regrets. "I've behaved like a cad. Do forgive me! Don't be wrathy. But you can't be—or you'd never have come back."
"You dear, it's all right!" He caught the outstretched hands in both his and wrung them. "Forget—and let's be happy." The truth about Bawne tugged at him as he said the words, but he had determined not to torture her with that horror. He went on, with the frankness that she found so lovable, "I was vexed, but it was idiotic of me not to have told you about the Commission before."
"And the man. Your French sossifer," she went on, "who looked at me as though I ought to live in a cage at the Zoo? What must he have thought of your taste in young women? What mustn't he have said when he got you out of the way?"
"Oh, not much!"
"Go on. Rub it in!"
"Well then"—Sherbrand's mouth was steady, but the laughter in his eyes was not to be controlled—"he saw I was fearfully sick at your having shown temper before him. And he told me not to be chagrined because a handsome woman had made me a little drama."
"F'ff!" She winced and set her teeth on her crimson underlip. "He knew I'd ask and you'd tell me. He saw me—squirming—in his mind's eye. Oh! and how he's hit me off. For I was awfully like the heavy leading lady of a tin travelling theatre-company. Aren't you ashamed of me? Don't you loathe me?" she wooed with entreating eyes.
"Frightfully. Tell me—where can we have a cosy talk together? I've got a whole hour before I'm due at Hendon," he said.
"The Rose-and-Green Divan—but there are sure to be people smoking there. Oh!—I know. The Little Library. Nobody ever goes in, and it's got a door opening into the Divan. Friends of Members aren't admitted into the Library—but if you're caught there—you say you were coming out of the Divan, where outsiders are allowed—and opened the wrong door—do you switch on?"
He nodded, repressing the desire to ask in whose company she had been caught there, and followed the tall lithe figure down a short corridor leading to the back of the ground-floor. The corridor ended in the Little Library, a studious apartment of bathing-machine dimensions, walled with curiously new-appearing books of information and reference, and containing two small writing-tables, each supported by a rosewood-stained Windsor, a brace of baskets, and two deep, cushiony, Rothmore chairs. A Member of mature years and mountainous proportions slept placidly in one of these, with Whitaker's Peerage balanced at a perilous angle on the vanishing indications of what must once have been her lap. The subdued murmur of voices trickled in from the adjoining smoking-room with vaporous wisps of Turkish and Virginia. Save for the stout slumbering Member the lovers were beautifully alone.