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Ashe had half risen the newspaper was crushed in his hand when the Swiss waitress whom the men of the inn called Fräulein Anna who was, indeed, the daughter of the landlord came back. "How are you, madame?" she said, with a smile, and in a slow English of which she was evidently proud. "I'm better to-day," said the other, hastily. "I shall start to-morrow.
And he teasingly held it up above her head. But she gave a little jump, caught it, and ran off with it to her room. "Much regret impossible stop publication. Fifty copies distributed already. Writing." She dropped speechless on the edge of her bed, the crumpled telegram in her hand. The minutes passed. "When will you be ready?" said Ashe, tapping at the door. "Is the gondola there?"
Probably you do not know what it is to suffer from your feet." He surveyed Ashe, his whisky toddy and the wall beyond him, with heavy-lidded inscrutability. "Corns!" he said. Ashe said he was sorry. "I suffer extremely from my feet not only corns. I have but recently recovered from an ingrowing toenail. I suffered greatly from my ingrowing toenail. I suffer from swollen joints."
A knock at the door arrested her. "Don't move!" she said, peremptorily, before she ran to open the door. "Please, my lady," said Blanche, "Lady Tranmore would like to see you." Kitty started and flushed. She looked round uncertainly at Ashe. "Ask her ladyship to come up," said Ashe, quietly. The maid departed. "Feed me if you want to, Kitty," said Ashe, still seated.
The hall and staircase of Yorkshire House were already filled with a motley and magnificent crowd when Ashe and Kitty arrived. Kitty, still shrouded in her cloak, pushed her way through, exchanging greetings with friends, shrieking a little now and then for the safety of her bow and quiver, her face flushed with pleasure and excitement.
"And you know what friends he and I were poor Freddy! But, after all, the world's the world." "Yes we all grow on somebody's grave," said Ashe. Then, just as she became conscious that she had jarred upon him, and must find a new opening, he himself found it. "Tell me!" he said, bending forward with a sudden alertness "who is that lady?"
The report of the little boy was good; he smiled at his father, and Ashe felt a cooling balm in the touch of his soft hands and lips. He descended in a more philosophical mind; inclined, at any rate, to "damn" Lord Parham. What a fool the man must be! Why couldn't he have taken it with a laugh, and so turned the tables on Kitty? Was there any good to be got out of apologizing?
But as Ashe well knew, the aspect and personality of Geoffrey Cliffe possessed for innumerable men and women, in English "society" and out of it, a fascination it was easier to laugh at than to explain. Lady Kitty had eyes certainly for no one else. When he spoke of "defeating" her, she laughed her defiance, and a glance of battle passed between her and Cliffe.
"Of course for himself. But a more fatalist believer in liberty than Ashe doesn't exist liberty especially to damn yourself if you must and will." "It would be hard to extend that doctrine to a wife," said the other, with a grave, uncomfortable laugh. Meanwhile the man whose affairs they had been discussing walked home, wrapped in solitary and disagreeable thought.
Ashe was not normally a young man of particularly ready wit; but on this occasion it may have been that the shock of this revelation, added to the fact that something must be done speedily if Joan's discomposure was not to become obvious to all present, quickened his intelligence. Joan, usually so sure of herself, so ready of resource, had gone temporarily to pieces.
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