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From the gallery, where were bestowed the musicians out of three parishes, floated the pensive strains of a minuet, and in the centre of the polished floor, under the eyes of the company, several couples moved and postured through that stately dance. "The lady is my ward," said Haward lightly. "I call her Audrey. Child, tell his Excellency your other name."
Audrey had not heard it, and she did not notice his movement. Her head was still bent; and over it Phil, glaring like a tiger, met the quiet, critical eyes of the girl's husband. He rose to his feet the next instant, but he did not utter a word. As for Tudor, he stood quite motionless, quite inscrutable, for the space of seconds, looking gravely in upon them.
"I don't think it'll be very bad. But you must take great care of him, Audrey. And I don't know how to do. I don't like your being left so much alone, and yet there's no one in the house fit to take care of you." "Hasn't Mrs. Partridge got a new nurse for us?" I asked. "No," said Uncle Geoff, smiling a little. "She hasn't found one yet." There came a sort of squeal from the corner of the room.
I daresay I ought to be able to learn to do that well, anyhow." "Have you forgiven me for this afternoon?" "I wasn't angry. I understood." That was it, in a nutshell. Audrey understood. She was that sort. She never held small resentments. He rather thought she never felt them. "Don't talk about me," she said. "Tell me about you and why you are here. It's the war, of course."
"But you've nothing else to wear." "I can't help that." "But you can't come. What on earth shall you do?" "I dare say I shall go to bed. Or I might shoot myself. But if you think that I'm going outside this room in this dress, you're a perfect simpleton, Audrey. I don't mind being a fool, but I won't look one." Audrey heard Musa enter the drawing-room.
So what could Chatfield know of him to have any hold?" "Oh, I don't know and I don't care much," replied Audrey, as they passed out of the woods on to the headlands beyond. "Never mind all that here's the sea and the open sky hang Chatfield, and Marston, too! As we can't see the Keep, let's enjoy ourselves some other way. What shall we do?"
She moved on, always with the soft rustle, leaving behind her a delicate whiff of violets and a wide-eyed clergyman, who stared after her admiringly. "What a beautiful woman!" he said. There was a faint regret in his voice that Audrey had not presented him, and he did not see that her coffee-cup trembled as she lifted it to her lips.
Audrey, overcome by this prodigious blow, trembled at the contemplation of her blind stupidity. Beyond question, Musa now looked extremely important, vivid, masterful. She had been mistaking him for a nice, ornamental, useless boy. Just as the café-restaurant had been an intensification of ordinary life, so was the ball in Dauphin's studio an intensification of the café-restaurant.
She chattered away gaily to Sara, giving her vivacious thumb-nail portraits of her future neighbours the people Selwyn had described as being "much nicer than ourselves." "The Herricks and Audrey Maynard are our most intimate friends I'm sure you'll adore them. Mrs. Maynard is a widow, and if she weren't so frightfully rich, Monkshaven would be perennially shocked at her.
Audrey rose, and turned her face, not to the justice of the peace and arbiter of the fate of witches, but to Evelyn, standing above her, Evelyn, slighter, paler, than she had been at Williamsburgh, but beautiful in her colored, fragrant silks and the air that was hers of sweet and mournful distinction. Now she cried out sharply, while "That girl again!" swore the Colonel, beneath his breath.
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