Muriel also gave him her hand, Wentworth his rather distantly, though he smiled, and Emily bent her head with a sumptuous negative politeness, without rising from her chair.
In a minute or so, the good Fernando was seated, and gazing at them with opaque glittering eyes which restlessly flickered and seemed not so much to look at them, as toward them. He began to feel, magnetically, that there was something mysterious and menacing in their manner, and his plump, colorless, morbid face grew marble-cool and immobile, with the lips a little parted and rigid, as the lips usually are when there is an attempt at the concealment of emotion or purpose.
“Well, Fernando, have you heard the news,” said Wentworth, alluding to Harrington and Muriel’s marriage.
“No,” drawled Witherlee, with a face discharged of all expression. “What is it?”
“Haven’t you seen the papers this morning?” said Wentworth.
“No; I rose rather late this morning,” was the equable answer, “and didn’t breakfast at home. I went down to Parker’s and had a lunch with a bottle of Sotairne, and it never occurred to me to glance at the paper. What is the news?”
Wentworth paused a moment, conscious that Witherlee had not heard of the marriage, and filled with an amused disgust, especially at the affected drawl with which the young fop had pronounced the word Sauterne, and generally at his ostentatious and unnecessary mention of his epicurean breakfast.
“The news is,” replied Wentworth, changing his intention, “that Emily and I are engaged to be married in October.”
Witherlee looked at him for a moment with his eyes more opaque, his lips more rigid, his face more expressionless than before, and slightly lifted his handsome eyebrows; then smiled with immense cordiality.
“I am very glad to hear it,” he exclaimed, with tender empressement, “very glad indeed. But you surprise me. I hadn’t the remotest idea that such a thing would happen”—