Lord Ettrick wrinkled his forehead in surprise and shook his head with a grim smile.
"Then, my young friend, if that's your ambition, you're not going the right way about it. I'm too busy by day to go out much at night, but any time during the last month or two … You know how people talk; and you're both of you pretty well known." Eric's look of mortification roused him to a more conciliatory tone. "It's done now, and, if it doesn't blow over, you'll only have yourself to thank. I wouldn't have mentioned the subject, if I thought it was going to spoil your dinner. But I very nearly congratulated you publicly.… Let's see if we're all here."
They returned to the fire, and Ettrick called the roll. Throughout dinner, when Eric ought to have been thinking over his speech, he sat dazed by the warning and his own blindness. Six weeks before, Lady Maitland was proclaiming that he and Barbara were in love with each other; now a dry stick of a law lord, retiring and uninterested in gossip, heard of their engagement from a dozen different mouths and was an inch removed from congratulating him before half the club. Eric might assume that other eyes had observed him calling for her, shopping with her; it was accepted that, when they dined in the same house, he should always take her home; it was almost accepted that one could not be invited to dine without the other.…
It hardly lay in his mouth to tell Barbara that she must not compromise herself.
A waiter entered with a telegram for Lord Ettrick, which he read and handed to Eric.
"Regret confined bed severe chill all success to dinner and congratulations and best wishes to our distinguished young friend."
It was signed by the one absentee, whose chair still stood empty on the opposite side. Eric suddenly remembered Barbara's note: "Imagine I'm sitting by you, darling." As he read it, he wished that he could have brought her there; in the morning-room he had wished—no, he had thought how proud he would have been to tell Lord Ettrick that the story was true. If he could see her now in the empty chair, a rose behind one ear, a silk shawl broidered with grey birds in flight, as on the evening when they first met.…
But she would hardly come dressed as Carmen. And, however she arrayed herself, the Thespian Club would not admit her.…
"Well, have you thought out your speech?" asked Lord Ettrick.
"I've been thinking about what you said before dinner," Eric answered.