“Well, I am less delicate. I want to know it, whether she wishes me to or not. And yet I am more devoted to her than you are. I have known her for quite a long time.”
“One can learn devotion very quickly,” he said, pressing her hand before he let it go.
Then she turned to go into the hotel. Just before she passed through the swing door she looked round at Craven. The movement of her young head was delicious.
“After all, in spite of the charm that won’t die,” he thought, “there’s nothing like youth for calling you.”
He thought Lady Sellingworth really more charming than Miss Van Tuyn, but he knew that the feeling of her hand in his would not have thrilled something in him, a very intimate part of himself, as he had just been thrilled.
He felt almost angry with himself as he walked away, and he muttered under his breath:
Not many days later Craven received a note from Miss Van Tuyn asking him to come to see her at a certain hour on a certain day. He went and found her alone in a private sitting-room overlooking the Park. For the first time he saw her without a hat. With her beautiful corn-coloured hair uncovered she looked, he thought, more lovely than when he had seen her at Lady Sellingworth’s. She noted that thought at once, caught it on the wing through his mind, as it were, and caged it comfortably in hers.
“I have seen the ‘old guard,’” she said, after she had let him hold and press her hand for two or three seconds.
She sat down on a sofa by a basket of roses. He sat down near her.
“I have met Lady Wrackley, but I can hardly say I know her. Still, she shows her teeth at me when I come into a room where she is.”
“Positive; except, of course, to her Creator. Isn’t it wonderful to think that those three women are contemporaries of Lady Sellingworth?”
“Indeed it is! But surely you didn’t let them know that you knew they were? Or shall I say know they are?”
She smiled, showing perfect teeth, and shook her corn-coloured head.
“You see, I’m so young and live in Paris! And then I’m American. They have no idea how much I know. I just let them suppose that I only knew they were old enough to remember Lady Sellingworth when she was still a reigning beauty. I implied that _they_ were buds then.”