"Oh, how sweet of you to come in good time, not rush in just a moment before dinner is served. We can have a comfortable chat before Guy comes. He takes an awful time to dress, you know. His ties bother him really; he discards about half a dozen before he gets the proper bow. Isn't it silly?"
She was very girlish to-night, quite different from what she had been at the Southleigh party, staid, demure, a little resentful, and averse from conversation.
Murchison's thoughts flew back to that day at Blankfield when he had met a certain girl by chance at the tea-shop. Norah Burton had been just as girlish then as Mrs. Spencer was now, allowing for the six years' interval.
She crossed over to a Chesterfield, and motioned him to a seat beside her. Hugh obeyed her invitation, but he felt sure that she had done this with a motive. She was about to exercise her subtle fascination on her husband's friend.
"Now, please tell me all about yourself," she said. "You are Guy's friend, and I have a right to know. His friends are mine. I know what you have done in the war: you have suffered very terribly. But before that; please enlighten me."
It was a challenge. Did she desire to know as much of his past as he desired to know of hers? He looked at her very steadily.
"You know, Mrs. Spencer, it is a little difficult to go back to anything before those awful years of war. But I remember, as in a sort of dream, that, quite as a young man, I was gazetted to the Twenty-fifth Lancers."
"A crack regiment, was it not?" queried Mrs. Spencer. "My dear father was in the Twenty-fourth."
She was keeping it up bravely, he thought. He remembered Fairfax's story. The woman who had said good-bye to a fugitive card-sharper at Charing Cross Station, and kissed him affectionately, was hardly likely to be the daughter of an officer in the Twenty-fourth Lancers. He was not sure of very much, but of this one incident he was absolutely positive: Fairfax was a man who was always certain of his facts.
"I can't remember much about the early years; I expect I went through the usual trials and troubles of a young subaltern, was subjected to a good deal of ragging. Well, somehow, promotion came: I was Captain at quite a youthful age. The one thing that sticks in my mind, in those pre-war days, is the fact that we were quartered at Blankfield."