“That’s your fault,” said she. “You have been a brute all this last week.”
“I? A brute?” said Colin. “What do you mean? I thought I had been conducting myself superbly....”
He looked up quickly at the oblong of light that flowed from the open door into the gallery, and saw that it framed a shadow.
“Hullo, there’s Raymond,” he said, “looking after us. Here we are, Raymond. Come and join us.”
He heard Violet’s clicked tongue of impatience.
“I had to say that,” he whispered. “He won’t come.”
Colin’s psychology was correct enough; Raymond had not meant to be seen, he only meant to see. Besides he had a grievance against Violet for her impatience just now; he was annoyed with her.
“No, thanks,” he said, “I’m going to the smoking-room.”
“That’s to punish you, Vi,” said Colin with a tremble of laughter in his voice. “But perhaps we had better go in. You mustn’t vex him.”
Nothing could have been better calculated.
“Is one of the conditions of my engagement that I mustn’t speak to you?” she asked. “Certainly it seems like it.”
“Well, we’ll break it for once,” he said. “Now you’re vexed with me. That’s very unreasonable of you. You made your choice with your eyes open. You’ve chosen Raymond and Stanier. It stands to reason we can’t always be together. You can’t have Raymond and Stanier and me. It was your own doing. And I thought everything was going so well. Whenever I look up I see you and him holding hands, or else he’s kissing the back of your neck.”
“You’ve got to get used to it, Vi,” said he. “You’ve got to pay for having Stanier. Isn’t it worth it?”
He heard her take a quick breath; her control was swaying like a curtain in the wind.
“Oh, don’t be such a brute to me, Colin,” she said. “I hadn’t realised that--that you would desert me like this.”
Colin just passed his tongue over his lips.
“Oh, that doesn’t mean anything to you,” he said.
They were back now in the shadow of the yew-hedge, where one night she had kissed him. As he thought of that he knew that she was thinking of it too.
“Give Raymond up,” he said. “Let him and Stanier go. It will be the wisest thing you can do.”
He paused a moment, and all the witchery of the night came to the reinforcement of his charm.
“I want you, Vi,” he said. “Promise me. Give me a kiss and seal it.”