Mr. Amberley made a mock expression of horror.
"Good heavens!" he said, "what appalling revelations for a father to endure! I wish I had had an inkling of it at the time!"
"You couldn't have, Mr. Amberley," she answered, and her smile was more provocative than ever, and delightfully naughty. "We used to do it in the bathroom. The hot vapour from the bath took all the smell of tobacco away. I discovered that!"
"Tell me some more, my dear. What other iniquities did you all perpetrate--and I thought Muriel such a pattern girl."
"Oh, we did lots of things, Mr. Amberley, but it wouldn't be fair to give them away. We were little devils, nearly all of us!"
She gave him a little Parisian salute from the ends of her eyelids, instinct with a kind of impish innocence, the sort of thing that has an irresistible appeal to a middle-aged man of the world.
"Muriel!" Mr. Amberley said to his daughter, "Miss Wallace has been telling me dreadful things about your schooldays. I am grieved and pained!"
Muriel Amberley was a slim girl with dark smouldering eyes and a faint enigmatic smile. Her voice was very clear and fresh and there was a vibrant note in it like the clash of silver bells. She had been talking to Mrs. Toftrees, but she looked up as her father spoke.
"Don't be a wretch, Cupid!" she said, to Rita Wallace over the table.
"Cupid? Why Cupid?" Herbert Toftrees asked, in his deep voice.
"Oh, it's a name we gave her at school," Muriel answered, looking at her friend, and both girls began to laugh.
Mr. Amberley re-engaged the girl in talk.
"You have done some literary work, have you not?" he asked kindly, and in a lower voice.
Again her face changed. Its first virginal demureness, the sudden flashing splendour of her smile, had gone alike. It became eager and wistful too.
"You can't call it _that_, Mr. Amberley," she replied in a voice pitched to his own key. "I've written a few stories which have been published and I've had three articles in the Saturday edition of the _Westminster_--that's nearly everything. But I can't say how I love it all! It is delightful to have my work among books--at the Podley Library you know. I learned typewriting and shorthand and was afraid that I should have to go into a city office--and then this turned up."