"Now, I've told you how to get clear of this petty and miserable affair. If you don't do it, for Christine's sake as well as for your own, you're no man.
"JIM EDGERTON."
CHAPTER XI
QUOD ERAT FACIENDUM
With the daily advent of men arriving for the flight-shooting, now imminent, Lillian Wemyss seemed to grow prettier and slimmer every day until the perfectly visible metamorphosis had produced radiant and brand-new creature.
For the men who were now accumulating in billiard room and card room, who haunted stable and garage and kennel, were the sort of men who inspired the very breath of life in a woman of her sort—big, handsome, ruddy-faced, thick-necked men with large, indiscriminating tastes and an eternal readiness for anything from a half-broken horse to an unbroken woman, but heartily preferring them both bridlewise and registered.
They tramped all over the place, on the terrace, over the lawn, in to dinner; and the house echoed with large bantering voices, loud unfeigned laughter—and they rode hard and drank hard and played for heavy stakes, and were up and tramping all over the place by sunrise, sniffing for the frost which would bring the first night flight of woodcock from the north into the far-famed coverts of the Adriutha hills.
And the best-looking, most humorous, and most reckless among them was Scott Wallace, a young giant of infinite jest, who began by pleasing himself with Diana and, out of the sheer perversity of humorous animal spirits, pretended to her that he scarcely knew one end of a shotgun from the other, which gave him a pretext for dawdling over the country with her, and making love to her until such time as the flight might send him seriously afield.
So, as he cared nothing for the scattered pheasants and wilder and scarcer grouse, he amused himself and Diana by playing Winkle, now and then consoling himself with a difficult shot, which satisfied him and left the girl none the wiser.
But on Wallace Mrs. Wemyss had her blue eyes fixed with all the veiled alertness and objectless intensity of the sort of woman she was—a woman who would never be dunce enough to marry again.