'I beg pardon, sir,' said she inimically. 'I thought Sir George was gone.'
Mrs. Mawner enveloped the pair in her sinister glance.
Giving a hitch to her sackcloth, she departed and banged the door.
Henry and Miss Foster were solitary again. And as he glanced at her, he thought deliciously: 'I am a gay spark.' Never before had such a notion visited him.
'What first gave you the idea of writing _Love in Babylon_, Mr. Knight?' began Miss Foster, smiling upon him with a marvellous allurement.
Henry was nearly an hour later than usual in arriving home, but he offered no explanation to his mother and aunt beyond saying that he had been detained by a caller, after Sir George's departure. He read in the faces of his mother and aunt their natural pride that he should be capable of conducting Sir George's business for him after Sir George's departure of a night. Yet he found himself incapable of correcting the false impression which he had wittingly given. In plain terms, he could not tell the ladies, he could not bring himself to tell them, that a well-dressed young woman had called upon him at a peculiar hour and interviewed him in the strict privacy of Sir George's own room on behalf of a lady's paper called _Home and Beauty_. He wanted very much to impart to them these quite harmless and, indeed, rather agreeable and honourable facts, but his lips would not frame the communicating words. Not even when the talk turned, as of course it did, to _Love in Babylon_, did he contrive to mention the interview. It was ridiculous; but so it was.
'By the way----' he began once, but his mother happened to speak at the same instant.
'What were you going to say, Henry?' Aunt Annie asked when Mrs. Knight had finished.
'Oh, nothing. I forget,' said the miserable poltroon.
'The next advertisement will say twentieth thousand, that's what it will say--you'll see!' remarked Mrs. Knight.
'What an ass you are!' murmured Henry to Henry. 'You'll have to tell them some time, so why not now? Besides, what in thunder's the matter?'
Vaguely, dimly, he saw that Miss Foster's tight-fitting bodice was the matter. Yes, there was something about that bodice, those teeth, that tongue, that hair, something about _her_, which seemed to challenge the whole system of his ideas, all his philosophy, self-satisfaction, seriousness, smugness, and general invincibility. And he thought of her continually--no particular thought, but a comprehensive, enveloping, brooding, static thought. And he was strangely jolly and uplifted, full of affectionate, absent-minded good humour towards his mother and Aunt Annie.