There it exhaled and vanished as Mrs. Quant and the maids smilingly conducted the guests to their various quarters—vanished with the smiling formality of his greeting to Jacqueline.
The men returned first, clad in their knickerbockers and skating jackets. Cocktails awaited them in the billiard-room, and they gathered there in noisy curiosity over this celebrated house not often opened to anybody except its owner.
"Who is the dream, Jim?" demanded Reginald Ledyard. "I mean the wonder with the gold hair, that Mrs. Hammerton has in tow?"
"A friend of Aunt Hannah's—an expert in antique art—and as clever and charming as she is pretty," said Desboro pleasantly.
"High-brow! Oh, help!" muttered Ledyard. "Where's your library? I want to read up."
"She can talk like other people," remarked Van Alstyne. "I got next on the train—old lady Hammerton stood for me. She can flirt some, I'll tell you those."
Bertie Barkley extracted the olive from a Bronx and considered it seriously.
"The old lady is on a salary, of course. Nobody ever heard of anybody named Nevers," he remarked.
"They'll hear of somebody named Nevers now," observed Captain Herrendene with emphasis, "or," he added in modest self-depreciation, "I am all kinds of a liar."
"Where did you know her, Jim?" inquired Ledyard curiously.