"Oh, then stop. We can't quarrel yet—I've hardly seen you. Are you comfortable here? Would you like some French novels?"
"Yes, thank you. Yes, please!" She grew before him into a light and conventional person, apparently on her guard against freedom of speech. He moved a blind and ineffectual hand about to find the spring she had detached herself from, and after failing for a quarter of an hour he got up to go.
"I shan't bother you again before Saturday," he said. "I know what a week it will be at the theatre. Remember you are to give the man his orders about the brougham. I can get on perfectly with the cart. Good-bye! Calcutta is waiting for you."
"Calcutta is never impatient," said Miss Howe. "It is waiting with yawns and much whiskey and soda." She gave him a stately inclination with her hand, and he overcame the temptation to lay his own on his heart in a burlesque of it. At the door he remembered something, and turned. He stood looking back precisely where Laura Filbert had stood, but the sun was gone. "You might tell me more about your friend of the altruistic army," he said.
"You saw, you heard, you know."
"But——"
"Oh," cried she, disregardingly, "you can discover her for yourself, at the Army Headquarters in Bentinck street—you man!"
Lindsay closed the door behind him without replying, and half-way down the stairs her voice appealed to him over the bannisters.
"You might as well forget that. I didn't particularly mean it."
"I know you didn't," he returned. "You woman! But you yourself—you're not going to play with your heavenly visitant?"