"Buy her!" exclaimed Arkroyd. "Listen to him! Don't I tell you she's worth a million?"
"And I'd make her Countess of Dalrymple tomorrow if she hadn't a penny, and would have me," said Dalrymple.
"No use, my dear Savage," he said, tugging at his incipient fringe of down ruefully. "She won't have anything to say to yours truly, or to any one of us for that matter. She only smiles when we say pretty things, and shows her teeth at us. Besides, the title wouldn't tempt her. She's got one already. Don't I tell you she's one of the Earlsley lot? No; we've all had a try, even Arkroyd. He even went so far as to get a fellow to write a poem about her in one of the society journals, and signed it 'A. H.;' but she told him to his face that she didn't care for poetry. It was a pretty piece, too, wasn't it, Ark?"
"First-rate," said Arkroyd, with as much modesty as if he had written it. "But it was all thrown away on Lady Bell."
"On Lady Bell--Isabel Earlsley is her name. You're wool-gathering tonight, Jack."
"Oh, Lady Bell, is it?" said Jack, carelessly. "Go ahead. Anything else?"
"No, that's all, excepting that I'll wager a cool thousand to a china orange that you'll change your tone when you see her, Savage."
"Perhaps," said Jack, "but your description doesn't move me; not much, Ark. You're not good at that sort of thing. It isn't in your line. The only things you seem to have remarked are her smile and her teeth."
"Savage, you are, as usual, blunt, not to say rude. Let us have another bottle of Cliquot."
Jack shook his head, but another bottle came up, and he sat and took his share in silence, and, indeed, almost unconsciously. For all the attention he paid to the chatter of his two friends they might not have been present.
His thoughts flew backward to the shady grove of Warden Forest, to the girl who, like a vision of purity and innocence and loveliness, had floated like a dream across his life.
He gave one passing thought to Len, too, and his story.
It was a strange coincidence that they should both have met their fates at one and the same time, or nearly so.
He would have thought it stranger still if he could have lifted the veil of the future and seen how closely the web of his life was woven with the woof, not only of Una's, but of Laura Treherne, and also of Lady Bell Earlsley.