Henry disliked his fresh complexion, his moustache, the contemptuous curl of his upper lip. He decided at once that here was an enemy.
It would not in any case have been a very happy meeting, but difficulties were made yet more difficult by the fact, sufficiently obvious to the eyes of an already critical brother, that the two of them had been "having words" as they came along. Millie's cheeks were flushed and her eyes angry, and that she looked adorable when she was thus did not help substantially the meeting.
Millie went into the inner room and the two men sat stiffly opposite one another and carried on a hostile conversation.
"Beastly weather," Mr. Baxter volunteered.
"Oh, do you think so?" Henry smiled, as though in wonder at the extreme stupidity of his companion. "I should have said it had been rather fine lately."
"Only two days, I think. Just came up to see that Millie was all right."
"You won't have to bother any more now that she's got me to look after her," said Baxter, sucking the gold knob of his cane.
"As a matter of fact," said Henry, "she's pretty good at looking after herself."
"You're secretary to some old Johnny, aren't you?" asked Baxter.
"I'm helping a man edit some family papers," said Henry with dignity.
"Same thing, isn't it?" said Baxter. "I should hate it."
"I expect you would," said Henry, with emphatic meaning behind every word.
"Beastly place. Wouldn't have been there if it weren't for your sister. Good dancing, though. Do you dance?"
"You're wise on the whole. Awful bore having to talk to girls you don't know. One simply doesn't talk, if you know what I mean."
"Think I'll be off now, Millie," he said. "Got a lot to do. Will you creep away from your Cromwell Road to-morrow and have lunch with me?"
"All right," she said, with a readiness that showed that this was in some way a challenge to Mr. Baxter.
"By Jove, how your brother does hate me," that young gentleman remarked. Then with a sudden change of mood that was one of his most charming gifts, he threw himself at her feet.
"I'm a beast, Millie; I'm everything I shouldn't be, but I _do_ love you so! I do! I do! . . . The only decent thing in my worthless life, perhaps, but it's true."
On that particular afternoon he was very nearly frank and honest with her about many things. His love for her was always to remain the best and truest thing that he had ever known; but when he looked down into that tangle of his history and thence up into her clear, steadfast gaze his courage flagged--he could only reiterate again and again the one honest fact that he knew--that he did indeed love her with all the best that was in him. She knew that it was the perception of that that had first won her, and in all the doubts of him that were now beginning to perplex her heart, _that_ doubt never assailed her. He _did_ love her and was trying his best to be honest with her. That it was a poor best she was soon to know.