"I should love you to."
"I'll come, if you want me to.... Now I think I shall go to bed. It would be a tragedy if we had another scene. Good-night, Mr. Waring."
"Good-night, Lady Barbara."
She looked at him steadily before turning to the stairs, still undecided whether to be angry or intrigued. Jack went into the library, chose himself a book, undressed slowly, read for ten minutes and dropped instantly asleep. Lady Barbara stood for many minutes in front of a long mirror, admiring the black and silver dress and watching the gleam of her arms and shoulders as she moved. Then with careless impatience she loosened the dress, leaving it to fall and lie in a tumbled heap by the fire; shoe followed shoe, stocking followed stocking; her maid would repair the havoc in the morning, and it was a relief to lapse into untidiness after so many hours of Jack Waring's orderly influence. Pulling an armchair to the fire she began to brush her hair. Six hours before, as her maid had brushed it for her, she had rehearsed the meeting with Jack up to the point when he apologized for his presumption in criticizing her. If only she had stopped then! But he was wholly different from her preconception of him; fully as 'superior'—and with as little reason—but disappointing as an intellectual antagonist; he was commonplace in mind and yet had a certain blunt stubbornness of character, a refusal to be stampeded—together with an indifference which still piqued her.
And the indifference was broken by a solicitude which he expressed in terms to earn himself a horse-whipping. Her eyes were blinded by a hot rush of shame when she remembered her gentle words and appealing voice at the piano. "I'm not as bad as you expected?" Humility was a pleasant emotion, but a losing card. At their next encounter....
She laid aside the brush and sat staring into the fire. The room grew gradually colder, but she did not notice it. Only when her ears caught the sound of subdued voices on the stairs did she rouse with a shiver and jump into bed.
CHAPTER FIVE NOBODY'S FAULT
"Cock the gun that is not loaded, cook the frozen dynamite...."