‘Don’t be naughty,’ said Captain Gordon, leaning over the sofa from behind. ‘They’re very dear friends, and they’ve been separated for two years.’
Madeline heard this as plainly as they did. She noted disdainfully how it all fell in.
‘How absent you are tonight!’ Horace Innes exclaimed, when Miss Anderson had asked him a trivial question for the third time.
‘Hush!’ she said. ‘Mrs. Scallepa is going to sing;’ and as Mrs. Scallepa sang she let her eyes play over him with a light in them so tender, that once catching it the felt a sudden answering throb, and looked again; but after that her eyes were on the floor.
‘We are staying here,’ he said a quarter of an hour later, as he saw her into her rickshaw; ‘and I think I must see you to your quarters. It’s very dark, and there is an ugly little slip half-way between this and the Mall.
He ran upstairs to get his coat and stick, and a white face like an apparition suddenly hung itself on the edge of Madeline’s rickshaw-hood.
‘Don’t tell him tonight,’ it said, hoarsely.
‘Are you ready, Colonel Innes? Then good night, everybody,’ cried Madeline.
She was not at all sure that she would not tell Horace Innes ‘tonight’.