"You'll do it," snarled Kneedrock, _sotto-voce_.
"You know Caryll Carleigh, don't you, dear?" asked Lady Bellingdown.
She turned her big violet eyes his way, and he, watching eagerly, saw them fold to slits, just as Kneedrock had said. And Kneedrock saw them, too.
"And you prayed to be kept from mischief, eh?" he mused. "But of course you didn't mean it."
She crossed to Carleigh's side and sat down there. "And I prayed for others, too," she told him. "For you." With a laugh. "You need it; don't you?"
"I need it," he answered shortly. "Yes, surely."
She pulled off her heavy gloves and gave them, with the stick, to the staghound, which walked gravely away at once.
"Did you walk far?" Lady Bellingdown asked.
"Why, that's twelve miles," said Lord Waltheof.
Carleigh stared more frankly at her--at her head of gold, her brow of fairest ivory, set with gems of living amethyst beneath; at her long, sinuous figure, which suggested Lilith and the medieval conception of an angel as well.
When she lifted her eyes to him and smiled, he realized that it was the first really natural smile that he had encountered in a month.
Something cold within him warmed once more. The feminine then still held that which could affect him. His heart, after all, was not utterly dead.
He returned the smile, and the slits grew yet more narrow. And as they had seemed to young Andrews, on a night at Simla, and to Heaven only knows how many other men at Heaven only knows how many other places, so they seemed to him--cleft opals, with the devil splitting the hairs of the lashes that kept them from scorching a mere masculine mortal.
"I remember you as a little girl," he murmured.
"First blood," said Kneedrock, who had been listening, in a half-whisper to the duke.
"Yes, but you know she'll brace him up," returned his grace. "She really will. My word, but she's very bracing, is Nina. I like her. I always have."
"He'll be very glad to creep back, scratched and minus one ear, and marry his fiancée in six months," rejoined the honorable viscount with bitter cynicism.
"Do you really think so?" asked the duke.
"Think so! I know it," yawned Kneedrock. "She doesn't care who rattles the bones, once she's had the meat."
When the men came in after dinner that evening Mrs. Darling sat alone in a huge red satin _causeuse_; one of those queer, hard, tufted royal things that fashion pitched in among the wigs and powder of one past period.