All of which excellent advice left her just where she was before. When she saw Miss Joliffe and the maids busy about the tea-table in the rear she was glad to get up and find some use for her hands and some occupation for her mind.
Rick, unexpectedly, came with her. "I'm a push-over for passing plates. It must be the gigolo in me."
Lucy said that he ought to be watching his lady-love's rigmaroles.
"It is the last dance. And if I know anything of my Teresa her appetite will take more appeasing than her vanity, considerable as it is."
He seemed to know his Teresa very well, Lucy thought.
"Are you worried about something, Miss Pym?"
The question took her by surprise.
"Why should you think that?"
"I don't know. I just got the impression. Is there anything I can do?"
Lucy remembered how on Sunday evening when she had nearly cried into the Bidlington rarebit he had known about her tiredness and tacitly helped her. She wished that she had met someone as understanding and as young and as beautiful as The Nut Tart's follower when she was twenty, instead of Alan and his Adam's apple and his holey socks.