The dinner progressed with all the stateliness of service, and the exquisite choice of food which is associated with a restaurant whose chef receives the salary of a statesman.
Gilda said, during one of those intervals, when a pièce de résistance, which is to follow, has justified a delay:
“Oh, Raife, uncle said to-day—”
With a gesture of impatience he interrupted: “Don’t tell me what your uncle said. I don’t want to know what he says. I only want to know what you say.”
Then he smiled, as many another lover has smiled, who was tempted into a lapse of perfect and complete adoration of his loved one. Even in these happy conditions, where everything seemed favourable to a perfect courtship, love was on tenterhooks.
The dinner was finished, and those supplementary accompaniments to the modern meal were in progress. Cigarettes—cigars—liqueurs, were in course of leisurely consumption by some people. Others were leaving, to continue their round of pleasure at theatre—revue—music-hall, or in one of the hundreds of haunts where the leisured ones congregate at night-time. Among those who were leaving were two men, both of whom carried a distinction with them. One, who was the personification of perfectly-dressed dandydom, with a drawl, nudged his companion’s elbow and indicated Raife and Gilda at their table. He whispered to his companion “I will tell you something about them presently.” The other replied: “Do, old chap! They’re a deuced handsome couple, whoever they are.” They passed out.
Others were moving, and some, as they passed, bowed to Gilda. Raife could not get over the depression which had come over him as they had leant over the balustrade and gazed at the sad-looking river before dinner. He found an excuse quite early in the evening and accompanied Gilda to her hotel in Bloomsbury. There was a strained manner which had broken the chain of happiness that had lasted for two weeks. Having bade adieu to Gilda he told his chauffeur to drive him to his rooms in Duke Street. When he arrived, he hastily donned a dressing-gown, and, calling his man, ordered a fire to be lit. A disturbed mind frequently desires the solace of a fire, and Raife’s mind was perturbed with a sense of foreboding. A box of cigars, with a decanter of brandy and some soda-water, completed his equipment for a moody contemplation of affairs. As he reclined in the deep-set leather arm-chair, he appeared a perfect paragon of manhood. He was clad in a thin Japanese silk dressing-gown of many and bright-hued colours. The sombre black of his evening clothes underneath, heightened by the dazzling brilliancy of a broad expanse of shirt-front, completed the colour scheme, revealed in the subdued light from a shaded lamp on the small oriental table at his side. Trouble sat heavily on his handsome countenance, as he gazed into the crackling flames of the fire that his man, Pulman, had recently lit.
“Anything more, sir?” asked that discreet person, a fine type of the unrivalled English manservant.
“Nothing more, Pulman.” And as the door was being softly closed, he called out: “Oh, Pulman, I don’t want to be disturbed.”
“Very good, sir,” and he retired. As he disappeared downstairs he said to himself: “Ten to one there’s a woman in the case. That ain’t at all like Sir Raife, leastways, not as I have known him all these years.” Pulman sighed a sigh of wisdom as he opened the door in the basement on his way up the area-steps to a neighbouring hostelry.