“Tea is ...” he began, but abruptly ended the sentence on catching sight of the young man’s face. For Robin, habitually so self-possessed, looked positively haggard. His face was set and there was a weary look in his eyes. The young man appeared so utterly different from his wonted self that Bude fairly stared at him.
But Robin, without paying the least attention either to the butler or to the sound of voices in the lounge, strode across the outer hall and disappeared through the glass door of the corridor leading to the great drawing-room and the library.
Bude stood an instant gazing after him in perplexity, then moved across the hall to the servants’ quarters.
In the meantime in the lounge the little doctor snapped the case of his watch and opined that he wanted his tea.
“Where on earth has everybody got to? What’s become of Lady Margaret? I haven’t seen her since lunch....”
That lady answered his question by appearing in person.
Lady Margaret was tall and hard and glittering. Like so many Englishwomen of good family, she was so saturated with the traditions of her class that her manner was almost indistinguishable from that of a man. Well-mannered, broadminded, wholly cynical, and absolutely fearless, she went through life exactly as though she were following a path carefully taped out for her by a suitably instructed Providence. Somewhere beneath the mask of smiling indifference she presented so bravely to a difficult world, she had a heart, but so carefully did she hide it that Horace had only discovered it on a certain grey November morning when he had started out for the first time on active service. For ever afterwards a certain weighing-machine at Waterloo Station, by which he had had a startling vision of his mother standing with heaving bosom and tear-stained face, possessed in his mind the attributes of some secret and sacred shrine.
But now she was cool and well-gowned and self-contained as ever.
“What a perfectly dreadful day!” she exclaimed in her pleasant, well-bred voice. “Horace, you must positively go and see Henry What’s-his-name in the Foreign Office and get me a passport for Cannes. The weather in England in the winter is incredibly exaggerated!”
“At least,” said the doctor, rubbing his back as he warmed himself at the fire, “we have fuel in England. Give me England, climate and all, but don’t take away my fire. The sun doesn’t shine on the Riviera at night, you know!”