“Then why aren’t we all right?”
“Well, if you will——!”
“Oh for ever and ever and ever!”—and with this ardent cry of his devotion his arms closed in their strength and she was clasped to his breast and to his lips.
The next moment, however, she had checked him with the warning “Amy Sandgate!”—as if she had heard their hostess enter the other room. Lady Sand-gate was in fact almost already upon them—their disjunction had scarce been effected and she had reached the nearer threshold. They had at once put the widest space possible between them—a little of the flurry of which transaction agitated doubtless their clutch at composure. They gave back a shade awkwardly and consciously, on one side and the other, the speculative though gracious attention she for a few moments made them and their recent intimate relation the subject of; from all of which indeed Lady Grace sought and found cover in a prompt and responsible address to Hugh. “Mustn’t you go without more delay to Clifford Street?”
He came back to it all alert “At once!” He had recovered his hat and reached the other door, whence he gesticulated farewell to the elder lady. “Please pardon me”—and he disappeared.
Lady Sandgate hereupon stood for a little silently confronted with the girl. “Have you freedom of mind for the fact that your father’s suddenly at hand?”
“He has come back?”—Lady Grace was sharply struck.
“He arrives this afternoon and appears to go straight to Kitty—according to a wire that I find downstairs on coming back late from my luncheon. He has returned with a rush—as,” said his correspondent in the elation of triumph, “I was sure he would!”
Her young friend was more at sea. “Brought back, you mean, by the outcry—even though he so hates it?”
But she was more and more all lucidity—save in so far as she was now almost all authority. “Ah, hating still more to seem afraid, he has come back to face the music!”