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He stood and watched her with a smile as she fled down the half-lit vista to the hall. If Darrow, on entering the drawing-room before dinner, examined its new occupant with unusual interest, it was more on Owen Leath's account than his own. Anna's hints had roused his interest in the lad's love affair, and he wondered what manner of girl the heroine of the coming conflict might be.
With his bursts of door-slamming activity, his fits of bookish indolence, his crude revolutionary dogmatizing and his flashes of precocious irony, the boy was not unlike a boisterous embodiment of his father's theories. It was as though Fraser Leath's ideas, accustomed to hang like marionettes on their pegs, should suddenly come down and walk.
Darrow instantly perceived what dread suspicion again possessed her, and the sense that it was not wholly unjustified caused him a passing pang of shame. But it did not turn him from his purpose. "I'm an old friend of Mrs. Leath's. It's not unnatural that Madame de Chantelle should talk to me."
He had become conscious again that, a few feet off, on the other side of a thin partition, a small keen flame of life was quivering and agitating the air. Sophy's face came hack to him insistently. It was as vivid now as Mrs. Leath's had been a moment earlier.
"Thank you. This is my first Ball." "Who would think that? Ta-ram-te-tum-te-TA.... Jolly tu-une!" She caught glimpses of every one as they went round. Mrs. Combermere's cloth of gold, Lady St. Leath's white hair. Poor Lady Mary such a pity that they could not do something for her complexion. Spotty. Joan liked her.
Leath and his wife. Now he concluded that there had probably been none. Mrs. Leath's words gave no hint of her husband's having failed to justify her choice; but her very reticence betrayed her.
Leath's quality that every movement, every syllable, told with her. Even in the old days, as an intent grave-eyed girl, she had seldom misplaced her light strokes; and Darrow, on meeting her again, had immediately felt how much finer and surer an instrument of expression she had become. Their evening together had been a long confirmation of this feeling.
He told himself that he could have borne an equal amount of pain, if only it had left Mrs. Leath's image untouched; but he could not bear to think of her as trivial or insincere. The thought was so intolerable that he felt a blind desire to punish some one else for the pain it caused him. As he sat moodily staring at the carpet its silly intricacies melted into a blur from which the eyes of Mrs.
When he rejoined Miss Viner, Darrow's first care was to find out, by a rapid inspection of the house, whether Owen Leath's seat had given him a view of their box. But the young man was not visible from it, and Darrow concluded that he had been recognized in the corridor and not at his companion's side.
"I didn't suppose it was necessary to give you or any one else a reason for talking with a friend of Mrs. Leath's under Mrs. Leath's own roof." Owen hardly seemed to feel the retort: he kept his dogged stare on her face. "I won't ask for one, then. I'll only ask you to give me your assurance that your talks with Darrow have had nothing to do with your suddenly deciding to leave Givre."
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