The girl gave a little gasp. Then she reddened with anger.
“How dare he?” she cried, stamping her foot; “how dare he?”
She sank on the lounge and, burying her face in her hands, burst into tears.
“Oh, Robin, Robin, dear!” she sobbed—incomprehensibly, for she was a woman.
CHAPTER II.
AT TWILIGHT
There is a delicious snugness, a charming lack of formality, about the ceremony of afternoon tea in an English country-house—it is much too indefinite a rite to dignify it by the name of meal—which makes it the most pleasant reunion of the day. For English country-house parties consist, for the most part, of a succession of meals to which the guests flock the more congenially as, in the interval, they have contrived to avoid one another’s companionship.
And so, scarcely had the last reverberation of Bude’s measured gonging died away than the French window leading from the lounge-hall on to the terrace was pushed open and two of Hartley Parrish’s guests emerged from the falling darkness without into the pleasant comfort of the firelit room.
They were an oddly matched pair. The one was a tubby little man with short bristly grey hair and a short bristly grey moustache to match. His stumpy legs looked ridiculous in his baggy golf knickers of rough tweed, which he wore with gaiters extending half-way up his short, stout calves. As he came in, he slung off the heavy tweed shooting-cloak he had been wearing and placed it with his Homburg hat on a chair.
This was Dr. Romain, whose name thus written seems indecently naked without the string of complementary initials indicative of the honours and degrees which years of bacteriological research had heaped upon him. His companion was a tall, slim, fair-haired young man, about as good a specimen of the young Englishman turned out by the English public school as one could find. He was extremely good-looking with a proud eye and finely chiselled features, but the suggestion of youth in his face and figure was countered by a certain poise, a kind of latent seriousness which contrasted strangely with the general cheery insouciance of his type.
A soldier would have spotted the symptoms at once, “Five years of war!” would have been his verdict—that long and strange entry into life of so many thousands of England’s manhood which impressed the stamp of premature seriousness on all those who came through. And Captain Sir Horace Trevert, Bart., D.S.O., had gone from his famous school straight into a famous regiment, had won his decoration before he was twenty-one, and been twice wounded into the bargain.