“I assure you she did! But she introduced me to him.”
“She cannot have heard of her father’s death,” said Braybrooke.
“But she had! For I expressed my sympathy and she thanked me.”
Braybrooke looked very ill at ease and glanced plaintively towards the place where Craven was sitting with the pretty American.
“No doubt she had been to visit old friends,” he said, “American friends.”
“But this man, Nicolas Arabian, lives alone in his flat. And I’m sure he’s not an American. Lady Archie has seen him several times with Beryl.”
“What’s he like?” asked Lady Wrackley.
“Marvellously handsome! A charmeur if ever there was one. Beryl certainly had good taste, but—”
At this moment there was a general movement. The butler had murmured to Mrs. Ackroyde that lunch was ready.
Lady Sellingworth was among the first few women who left the drawing-room, and was sitting at a round table in the big, stone-coloured dining-room when Baron de Melville, an habitue at Coombe, bent over her.