Mr. Amberley made a mock expression of horror.

"Good heavens!" he said, "what appalling revelations for a father to endure! I wish I had had an inkling of it at the time!"

"You couldn't have, Mr. Amberley," she answered, and her smile was more provocative than ever, and delightfully naughty. "We used to do it in the bathroom. The hot vapour from the bath took all the smell of tobacco away. I discovered that!"

"Tell me some more, my dear. What other iniquities did you all perpetrate--and I thought Muriel such a pattern girl."

"Oh, we did lots of things, Mr. Amberley, but it wouldn't be fair to give them away. We were little devils, nearly all of us!"

She gave him a little Parisian salute from the ends of her eyelids, instinct with a kind of impish innocence, the sort of thing that has an irresistible appeal to a middle-aged man of the world.

"Muriel!" Mr. Amberley said to his daughter, "Miss Wallace has been telling me dreadful things about your schooldays. I am grieved and pained!"

Muriel Amberley was a slim girl with dark smouldering eyes and a faint enigmatic smile. Her voice was very clear and fresh and there was a vibrant note in it like the clash of silver bells. She had been talking to Mrs. Toftrees, but she looked up as her father spoke.

"Don't be a wretch, Cupid!" she said, to Rita Wallace over the table.

"Cupid? Why Cupid?" Herbert Toftrees asked, in his deep voice.

"Oh, it's a name we gave her at school," Muriel answered, looking at her friend, and both girls began to laugh.

Mr. Amberley re-engaged the girl in talk.

"You have done some literary work, have you not?" he asked kindly, and in a lower voice.

Again her face changed. Its first virginal demureness, the sudden flashing splendour of her smile, had gone alike. It became eager and wistful too.

"You can't call it _that_, Mr. Amberley," she replied in a voice pitched to his own key. "I've written a few stories which have been published and I've had three articles in the Sat.u.r.day edition of the _Westminster_--that's nearly everything. But I can't say how I love it all! It is delightful to have my work among books--at the Podley Library you know. I learned typewriting and shorthand and was afraid that I should have to go into a city office--and then this turned up."

She hesitated for a moment, and then stopped shyly. He could see that the girl was afraid of boring him. A moment before, she had been perfectly collected and aware--a girl in his own rank of life responsive to his chaff. Now she realised that she was speaking of things very near and dear to her--and speaking of them to a high-priest of those Mysteries she loved--one holding keys to unlock all doors.

He took her in a moment, understood the change of mood and expression, and it was subtle flattery. Like all intelligent and successful men, recognition was not the least of his rewards. That this engaging child, even, knew him for what he was gave him an added interest in her. All Muriel's girl friends adored him. He was the nicest and most generous of unofficial Papas!--but this was different.

"Don't say that, my dear. Never depreciate yourself or belittle what you have done. I suppose you are about Muriel's age, twenty-one or two--yes?--then let me tell you that you have done excellently well."

"That is kind of you."

"No, it is sincere. No man knows how hard--or how easy--it is to succeed by writing to-day."

She understood him in a moment. "Only the other day, Mr. Amberley," she said, "I read Stevenson's 'Letter to a young gentleman who proposes to embrace the career of Art.' And if I _could_ write feeble things to tickle feeble minds I wouldn't even try. It seems so, so low!"

Quite unconsciously her eye had fallen upon Mrs. Toftrees opposite, who was again chattering away to Muriel Amberley.

He saw it, but gave no sign that he had done so.

"Keep such an ideal, my dear. Whether you do small or great things, it will bring you peace of mind and dignity of conscience. But don't despise or condemn merely popular writers. In the Kingdom of Art there are many mansions you know."

The girl made a slight movement of the head. He saw that she was touched and grateful at his interest in her small affairs, but that she wanted to dismiss them from his mind no less than from her own.

"But I _am_ mad, crazy," she said, "about _other_ peoples' work, the big peoples' work, the work one simply can't help reverencing!"

She had turned from him again and was looking down the table to where Gilbert Lothian was sitting.

"Yes," he answered, following the direction of her glance, "you are quite right _there_!"

She flushed with enthusiasm. "I did so want to see him," she said.

"I've hardly ever met any literary people at all before, certainly never any one who mattered. Muriel told me that Mr. Lothian was coming; she loves his poems as much as I do. And when she wrote and asked me I was terribly excited. It's so good of you to have me, Mr. Amberley."

Her voice was touching in its grat.i.tude, and he was touched at this damsel, so pretty, courageous and forlorn.

"I hope, my dear," he said, "that you will give us all the pleasure of seeing you here very often."

At that moment Mrs. Amberley looked up and her fine, shrewd eyes swept round the table. She was a handsome, hook-nosed dame, with a lavish coronet of grey hair, stately and kindly in expression, obviously capable of many tolerances, but with moments when "ne louche pas a La Reine" could be very plainly written on her face.

As she gathered up the three women and rose, Mr. Amberley knew in a moment that all was not quite well. No one else could have even guessed at it, but he knew. The years that had dealt so prosperously with him; Fate which had linked arms and was ever debonnair, had greatly blessed him in this also. He worshipped this stately madam, as she him, and always watched her face as some poor fisherman strives to read the Western sky.

The door of the Dining Room was towards Mrs. Amberley's end of the table, and, as the ladies rose and moved towards it, Gilbert Lothian had gone to it and held it open.

His table-napkin was in his right hand, his left was on the handle of the door, and as the women swept out, he bowed.

Herbert Toftrees thought that there was something rather theatrical, a little over-emphasised, in the bow--as he regarded the poet, whom he had met for the first time that night, from beneath watchful eye-lids.

And _did_ one bow? Wasn't it rather like a scene upon the stage?

Toftrees, a quite well-bred man, was a little puzzled by Gilbert Lothian. Then he concluded--and his whole thoughts upon the matter pa.s.sed idly through his mind within the duration of a single second--that the poet was an intimate friend of the house.

Lothian was closing the door, and Toftrees was sinking back into his chair, when the latter happened to glance at his host.

Amberley, still standing, was _watching_ Lothian--there was no other word which would correctly describe the big man's att.i.tude--and Toftrees felt strangely uneasy. Something seemed tapping nervously at the door of his mind. He heard the furtive knocking, half realised the name of the thought that timidly essayed an entrance, and then resolutely crushed it.

Such a thing was quite impossible, of course.

The four men sat down, more closely grouped together than before.

The coffee, which had been served by a footman, before the ladies had disappeared, was a pretence in cups no bigger than plovers' eggs.

Amberley liked the modern affectation of his women guests remaining at the table and sharing the joys of the after-dinner-hour. But now, the butler entered with larger cups and a tray of liqueurs, while the host himself poured out a gla.s.s of port and handed the old-fashioned cradle in which the bottle lay to young d.i.c.kson Ingworth on his right.

That curly-headed youth, who was a Pembroke man and knew the ritual of the Johnsonian Common Room at Oxford, gravely filled his own gla.s.s and pushed the bottle to Herbert Toftrees, who was in the vacated seat of his hostess, and pouring a little Perrier water into a tumbler.

The butler lifted the wicker-work cradle with care, pa.s.sed behind Toftrees, and set it before Gilbert Lothian.

Lothian looked at it for a moment and then made a decisive movement of his head.

"Thank you, no," he said, after a second's consideration, and in a voice that was slightly high-pitched but instinct with personality--it could never have been mistaken for any one else's voice, for instance--"I think I will have a whiskey and soda."

Toftrees, at the end of the table, within two feet of Lothian, gave a mental start. The popular novelist was rather confused.

A year ago no one had heard of Gilbert Lothian--that was not a name that counted in any way. He had been a sort of semi-obscure journalist who signed what he wrote in such papers as would print him. There were a couple of novels to his name which had obtained a sort of cult among minor people, and, certainly, some really eminent weeklies had published very occasional but signed reviews.