"You are now. So please remember to come often. Never fear mamma. I'll protect you. Oh, I'm just on tiptoe to see you in those skin things you wore in Africa. I made Vievie put on her leopard-skin gown, and I think it's the most terrible romantic thing! And now I'm just dying to see your hyena-skin trousers and those awful poisoned arrows and—"
"Dolores!" admonished Mrs. Gantry.
"Oh, piffle!" complained the girl, drawing aside for the men to pass her.
Even Mrs. Gantry was not equal to the rudeness of snubbing a caller in her own house—when she had given an earl permission to bring him. But the contrast between her greetings of the two men was, to say the least, noticeable.
Blake met her supercilious bearing toward him with an impassiveness that was intended to mask his contemptuous resentment. But Genevieve saw and understood. She rose and quietly remarked: "You'll excuse us, Aunt Amice. I wish Mr. Blake to see the palm room. I fancy it will carry him back to Mozambique."
Mrs. Gantry's look said that she wished Mr. Blake could be carried back to Mozambique and kept there. Her tongue said: "As you please, my dear. Yet I should have thought you'd had quite enough of Africa for a lifetime."
"One never can tell," replied Genevieve with a coldness that chilled the glow in Blake's eyes.
They went out side by side yet perceptibly constrained in their bearing toward one another.
Dolores flung herself across the room and into a chair facing her mother and Lord James.
"Did you see that?" she demanded. "I do believe Vievie is the coldest blooded creature! When she knows he's just dying for love of her! Why, I never—"