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"Ah, well," sighed the girl, "we shall have a nice long rest when we stop for tea at at what is the name of the place?" "Symon's Yat." Medenham's voice was husky. Truth to tell, he was rather beside himself. He had played for a high stake and had nearly won.
His own hot youth was crowded with episodes that Medenham might regard with disdain, yet he would be shocked out of his well-fed cynicism by the notion that his son was gallivanting round the country as the chauffeur of an unconventional American girl and a middle-aged harpy like Mrs. Devar. So Medenham's message was non-committal. Aunt Susan was unable to come Epsom to-day.
For the life of him he could not imitate the complete annihilation of self practiced by the well-bred English servant. The American girl missed the absence of this trait far less than the other woman, but, by this time, even Mrs. Devar began to accept Medenham's good-humored assumption of equality as part of the day's amusement. Cynthia handed him a card.
It was well, too, that Medenham's head was averted, since he simply dared not meet her frankly inquisitive gaze. "You know that such a thing would be horrid for me for all of us," she persisted. "Yes," he said, "I feel that very keenly. Thank goodness, the Frenchman felt it also." Cynthia thought fit to skip to the third item in her list. "Now as to Captain Devar?" she cried.
I want to get some of the grit out of my eyes and hair; then I shall become an absolute mark of interrogation so I warn you. Of course, I am delighted to see you; but queer things have happened, and I am pining to have them cleared up. When did you see father last? Is he still in London?" Mrs. Leland answered, with freer speech now, but in her heart she was saddened by Medenham's duplicity.
And Dale appeared, picking bits of hay off his uniform, and striving vainly to compose his features into their customary expression of a stolid alertness that hears nothing but his master's orders, sees nothing that does not concern his duties. He gave one sharp glance at the car, and his face grew chauffeurish, but the look of hang-dog despair returned when he met Medenham's eyes.
Devar's ultra-fashionable intonation died away midst the chatter and laughter of other promenaders. Medenham's first impulse was to follow and listen, since Devar had yielded to the common delusion of imagining that none except his companion on the sea-front that night understood a foreign language.
Being a pretentious person, however, and not able to afford the up-keep of a motor, she was enjoying the surprise of two well-dressed women who recognized her. Then the car leaped forward again, and she scored a dearly won triumph. At this crisis Medenham's scrutiny of the road map provided by Simmonds for the tour was well repaid.
She was really striving to depict her own confusion of ideas when stunned by the discovery of Medenham's position, but she only succeeded in stringing together a series of ill-natured innuendoes. Sandwiched between each paragraph of the story were the true gossip's catchwords thus: "What was I to think?" "What would people say if they knew?"
Then I shall call, praying meanwhile that there may be no Ducrots or Devars there to blight a glorious gossip. If you bring me up to date as to affairs in Park Lane I'll reciprocate about the giddy equator. How or perhaps I ought to say where is Porthcawl?" "In China," snapped her ladyship, fully alive to Medenham's polite evasion of her blandishments.
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