“No.” They had left the dusky darkness of the trees, and struck off across the lawn. “He could hardly be my father, as he’s forty-five and I—thirty!”
Then silence fell, and she knew that he was somewhat tumultuously readjusting his thoughts. If Mrs. Fraser, who was thirty-four, was in love with him, then this woman with the sleepy, farseeing eyes, who was only thirty—what an ass he had been! Just because he had known Bess Fraser ever since he was a kid, and because Lady Harden was a great swell, and wore diamond crowns and things, and had a son at Harrow——
And Lady Harden, apparently dreamily enjoying the exquisite evening, read his thoughts with the greatest ease, and smiled to herself—the vague smile that consisted more of a slight, dimpled lift of her upper lip than of a widening of her mouth.
That evening, by some caprice, she wore no diamonds, and the simplest of her rather sumptuous gowns.
Colonel Durrant, who had fallen deeply in love with her ten years before, and never fallen out, whispered to her that she looked twenty.
And as she smiled in answer, her eyes met Teddy Cleeve’s.
Mrs. Fraser, quite unconsciously, gave the great Lady Harden all the information she wanted.
And Lady Harden—her greatness, in several ways, was an undoubted fact, and the proof of this is that only two people in the world suspected it—was insatiable in the matter of information.
Like a boa constrictor, her tremendous curiosity would sleep for months, and then, on awakening, it hungered with a most mighty and most devastating hunger.