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"The boy," she cried. "Help me with him, Derek." Together they picked him up, fumbling in the darkness, and laid him on the ground beside his bed. Then Vane took her arm, and shouted in her ear, "Lie down, I tell you, lie down . . . quite flat." Obediently she lay down, and he stretched himself beside her on the ground.
Then Freddie burst into speech. His good-natured face was hard with unwonted scorn. Its cheerful vacuity had changed to stony contempt. For the second time in the evening the jolly old scales had fallen from Freddie's good old eyes, and, as Jill had done, he saw Derek as he was. "My sainted aunt!" he said slowly. "So that's it, what! Well, I've always thought a dashed lot of you, as you know.
Probably old Derek would simply be amused and laugh at the whole bally affair like a sportsman. Freddie cheered up considerably at the thought. Jill was talking to the parlormaid whose head had popped up over the banisters flanking the stairs that led to the kitchen. "Major Selby hasn't arrived yet, miss." "That's odd. I suppose he must have taken a later train."
"If your mother had asked me that question," she retorted with spirit "I should have told her that he was the man who got me safely out of the theatre after you . . ." She checked herself. She did not want to say the unforgiveable thing. "You see," she said, more quietly, "you had disappeared. . . ." "My mother is an old woman," said Derek stiffly. "Naturally I had to look after her.
Though it was scarcely audible, it was certain that something was astir. With a start Derek came back from the contemplation of his intolerable pain to the world of common happenings.
Freddie, keenly alive to the awkwardness of the situation, was scarlet and incoherent; and Jill, who desired nothing less than to talk with one so intimately connected in her mind with all that she had lost, was scarcely more collected. They parted without regret. The only satisfaction that came to Jill from the encounter was the knowledge that Derek was still out of town.
It had the further advantage that, coming suddenly as it did, it absorbed the attention of Miss Lucilla van Tromp, the sick lady's companion and niece, who became unable henceforth to give to the household of her cousin, Derek Pruyn, that general supervision which a kindly old maid can exercise in the home of a young and prosperous widower.
She wondered how she could ever have hesitated; it all seemed so very easy and obvious now. Baxter, Blandford what did anything matter? She had gone to Derek; the matter was decided. . . . Her maid came into the room, and advanced cautiously to the bed. "Ah! but Mam'selle es awake," she said. "And ze tea, mon Dieu, but it es quite cold." "What time is it, Celeste?" asked Joan.
It was not a thing which he, Derek, would want to see last forever; but while it did last it ought to be effective, and he would look to Diane to make it so. As it was not becoming that a daughter of his should need a bodyguard of youths, Diane would undertake the task of breaking up Dorothea's circle.
As in certain English portraits there is an inborn aptitude for statesmanship, so in Derek Pruyn there was that air, almost inseparable from the Van Tromp kinship, of one accustomed to possess money, to make money, to spend money, and to support moneyed responsibilities.
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