MR. TEMPLE BARHOLM seems in better spirits,” Lady Mallowe said to Captain Palliser as they walked on the terrace in the starlit dusk after dinner.
Captain Palliser took his cigar from his mouth and looked at the glowing end of it.
“He mayn’t exactly like all this, but he’s getting something out of it.”
“He is not getting much of what he evidently wants most. I am out of all patience,” said Lady Mallowe. “Joan treads him in the mire and sails about professing to be conducting herself flawlessly. She is too clever for me,” she added with bitterness.
Palliser laughed softly and said:
“She has got something up her sleeve, and so has he.”
“He!” Lady Mallowe quite ejaculated the word. “She always has. That’s her abominable secretive way. But he! T. Tembarom with something up his sleeve! One can’t imagine it.”
“Almost everybody has. I found that out long years ago,” said Palliser, looking at his cigar end again as if consulting it. “Since I arrived at the conclusion, I always take it for granted, and look out for it. I’ve become rather clever in following such things up, and I have taken an unusual interest in T. Tembarom from the first.”
Lady Mallowe turned her handsome face, much softened by an enwreathing gauze scarf, toward him anxiously.