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"Partly; but also the thing. Bread-and-butter is a change after a great many petits fours." Mrs. Lightmark smiled a little absently as she sat smoothing the creases out of her pretty, fawn-coloured gloves. "Oh, the petits fours," she said, "for choice. One can take more of them, and amuse one's self longer."
Later, before the two friends parted on the steps of the modest club, which included both in its list of town members, Lightmark assumed an air of mystery, sighed once or twice, and looked at his friend with an expression in which forgiveness, reproach, and the lateness of the hour were strangely commingled.
"For pity's sake, go!" Rainham bowed his head, obeyed her; as the door closed behind them he could hear that she cried softly, and that Lightmark, his silence at last broken, consoled her with inaudible words. Rainham turned at random out of Grove Road, walking aimlessly, and very fast, without considering direction.
It was Lightmark, who had discovered him in the course of a rapid walk down the Row, and had crossed over the small patch of intervening grass to make his salutations. "I knew you by your back," he remarked, after they had shaken hands "the ineffable languor of it; and, besides, who else but you would sit for choice on an October evening in such a wretched place?"
Lightmark grew a little pale, biting his lip, and frowning for a moment, before he assumed a desperate mask of good-humour. "Hang it, man!" he answered quickly, "be reasonable! Haven't you forgiven me yet? Though what you have to forgive I only want to congratulate you, to tell you that I admire your work immensely." "I don't want your congratulations," interrupted the other hoarsely.
He had abundant leisure to corroborate the first impression of a splendour for which he was hardly prepared, which had seized him when he entered the hall and surrendered his coat to a courteous servant in livery, before Lightmark, radiant and flushed with success, singled him out in the corner to which he had retreated in loneliness.
Lightmark and the Sylvesters occupied him much; but beyond a brief note from Mrs. Sylvester in Lucerne, which told him nothing that he would know, there came to him no news from Switzerland. In the matter of the girl whom he had befriended, recklessly, he told himself at times, difficulties multiplied.
When the tide of inspiration failed the speaker, as it soon did, Lightmark continued to look at him askance, with an air of absent consideration turning to uneasiness. There was a general silence, broken only by the occasional striking of a match and the knocking of pipe against boot-heel. Soon the young sculptor discovered that he had missed his last train, and fled incontinently.
"Ah yes! we saw the Sylvesters; we walked with the Sylvesters; we drank tea with the Sylvesters; we made music with the Sylvesters; we went on the lake with the Sylvesters. That handsome artist, Mr. Lightmark, is it not, Mary? was there, making the running with Miss Eve. The marriage seems to be arranged."
"I have had only a few sittings," she admitted, "and I expect they will be the last here. Perhaps they will be continued abroad. You know Mr. Lightmark is going to meet us in Switzerland, perhaps." "You will like that?" suggested Rainham gravely. She looked into her cup, beating a tattoo on the carpet with her little foot nervously. "Yes," she said, after a minute, "I think so."
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