“Mr. Alexander! I am delighted. Have you been in London long?”
Bartley bowed, somewhat laboriously, over her hand. “Long enough to have seen you more than once. How fine it all is!”
She laughed as if she were pleased. “I’m glad you think so. I like it. Won’t you join us here?”
“Miss Burgoyne was just telling us about a donkey-boy she had in Galway last summer,” Sir Harry Towne explained as the circle closed up again. Lord Westmere stroked his long white mustache with his bloodless hand and looked at Alexander blankly. Hilda was a good story-teller. She was sitting on the edge of her chair, as if she had alighted there for a moment only. Her primrose satin gown seemed like a soft sheath for her slender, supple figure, and its delicate color suited her white Irish skin and brown hair. Whatever she wore, people felt the charm of her active, girlish body with its slender hips and quick, eager shoulders. Alexander heard little of the story, but he watched Hilda intently. She must certainly, he reflected, be thirty, and he was honestly delighted to see that the years had treated her so indulgently. If her face had changed at all, it was in a slight hardening of the mouth—still eager enough to be very disconcerting at times, he felt—and in an added air of self-possession and self-reliance. She carried her head, too, a little more resolutely.
When the story was finished, Miss Burgoyne turned pointedly to Alexander, and the other men drifted away.
“I thought I saw you in MacConnell’s box with Mainhall one evening, but I supposed you had left town before this.”
She looked at him frankly and cordially, as if he were indeed merely an old friend whom she was glad to meet again.
“No, I’ve been mooning about here.”
Hilda laughed gayly. “Mooning! I see you mooning! You must be the busiest man in the world. Time and success have done well by you, you know. You’re handsomer than ever and you’ve gained a grand manner.”
Alexander blushed and bowed. “Time and success have been good friends to both of us. Aren’t you tremendously pleased with yourself?”