“I hear you are learning to play croquet,” the Duke of Stone remarked to him a day or so later. “How do you like it?”
“Lady Gwynedd Talchester is teaching me,” Tembarom answered. “I’d learn to iron shirt-waists if she would give me lessons. She’s one of the two that have dimples,” he added, reflection in his tone. “I guess that’ll count. Shouldn’t you think it would?”
“Miss Hutchinson?” queried the duke.
Tembarom nodded.
“Yes, it’s always her,” he answered without a ray of humor. “I just want to stack ’em up.”
“You are doing it,” the duke replied with a slightly twisted mouth. There were, in fact, moments when he might have fallen into fits of laughter while Tembarom was seriousness itself. “I’m doing my stunt, of course, but I like them,” said he. “They’re mighty nice to me when you consider what they’re up against. And these two with the dimples, Lady Gwynedd and Lady Honora, are just peaches.”
They were having one of their odd long talks under a particularly splendid copper beech which provided the sheltered out-of-door corner his grace liked best. When they took their seats together in this retreat, it was mysteriously understood that they were settling themselves down to enjoyment of their own, and must not be disturbed.
“What dear papa talks to him about, and what he talks about to dear papa,” Lady Celia had more than once murmured in her gently remote, high-nosed way, “I cannot possibly imagine. Sometimes when I have passed them on my way to the croquet lawn I have really seen them both look as absorbed as people in a play. Of course it is very good for papa. It has had quite a marked effect on his digestion. But isn’t it odd!”
“I wish,” Lady Edith remarked almost wistfully, “that I could get on better with him myself conversationally. But I don’t know what to talk about, and it makes me nervous.”
Their father, on the contrary, found in him unique resources, and this afternoon it occurred to him that he had never so far heard him express himself freely on the subject of Palliser. If led to do so, he would probably reveal that he had views of Captain Palliser of which he might not have been suspected, and the manner in which they would unfold themselves would more than probably be illuminating. The duke was, in fact, serenely sure that he required neither warning nor advice, and he had no intention of offering either. He wanted to hear the views.