"Are you going to—forget my promise?"
"No! I asked whether you cared for Jack as much as all that."
Barbara shook her head in bewilderment.
"I've given you my heart, Eric. But I owe Jack my soul."
Behind the neat phrasing of the professional trafficker in emotions, Eric felt that she was trying to weary him of their forty-eight hours' engagement.…
3
At the beginning of November Eric went to Lashmar for a long week-end. After the first days of his engagement he had hardly seen or heard anything of Barbara. She was presumably at Crawleigh Abbey, but for a week she answered no more than one letter out of three; after that, with a sense that he could do nothing right and that they were fretting each other's nerves, he ceased to correspond and was trying to absorb and exhaust himself with work. Now his novel was in the agent's hand, and "Mother's Son" had been sent to Manders.
As he dawdled before a book-stall at Waterloo, Eric's eye was caught by "The World and His Wife" contents' bill, which announced, with other attractions, an "Illustrated Interview with Mr. Eric Lane." There had not been time for him to receive the article from his news-cutting agency, and he bought a copy to read in the train. The pictures were well reproduced, and he was by now so hardened to the perverse inaccuracy and genial blatancy of the letter-press that he hardly blushed at the aspirations which were attributed to him, until his attention was arrested in mid-paragraph by Barbara's name. Collecting himself and glancing almost guiltily round the somnolent carriage, he turned back to the beginning.
"Rumour has been busy with the names of Mr. Lane and of Lady Barbara Neave, only daughter of the Marquess of Crawleigh. No official announcement has been made, but the young people have been going about together a good deal lately; some of our readers may have seen them at the PREMIÈRE of 'The Bomb-Shell.' The Stage has of recent years surrendered so much of its beauty and talent to the Peerage that it is high time for the Peerage to make this romantic return to the Stage.… Mr. Lane's advice to budding playwrights is reminiscent of Mr. Punch's famous advice to those about to marry—'Don't.' Though the 'Divorce' was his first play to be produced, it was not the first that he had written; like most authors, he had to buy experience.…"
There was nothing in the rest of the article to incriminate him, but the offending paragraph was enough in itself. Guiltily Eric looked round a second time. Two of his fellow-passengers, slumbering with mouths agape, were clutching "The World and His Wife" to their stomachs; it was the one periodical of later date than "Punch" and the monthly reviews which his parents took in at the Mill-House. Saturday was made eventful by its appearance; even Sir Francis interested himself in the full-page studies of actresses and débutantes, the house-party groups and snapshots of celebrities in the Park.…