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As he hung up his hat, the stillness was broken by the sudden ringing of the telephone. It rang in a peevish, scolding manner, as though this were not the first time and it had lost its temper with waiting. He climbed the flight of stairs to his library and, without waiting to switch on the lights, sat down at his table, taking up the receiver. "Yes." "Is this Lord Taborley?" a voice inquired.
The slightly puzzled expression on Maisie's watch-dog's face betrayed that fact to him at a glance. Maisie laid an arresting hand on his arm. To the maid she said cheerfully, "It's all right, Porter; Lord Taborley is staying." As Porter was making her exit, he commenced again to protest. Maisie silenced his objections by leaning against him warningly.
To the butler she said in a low tone, "It's all right, James; you don't need to wait. I'll announce Lord Taborley." The discreet James showed a fitting appreciation of romance by folding his plump hands across the pit of his stomach, making the ghost of a bow and tiptoeing noiselessly into the nether regions with the stealth of a conspirator. Terry's face was a picture of innocence.
"Don't mistake me, Lord Taborley, I'm not trying to secure what you're offering for myself." He began to see the drift of her argument. Before he could formulate it, she herself had put it into words. "Can't we do a little missionary work, you and I, by appreciating each other just a little?" Flinging prejudices to the winds, he took a place beside her on the couch. Why shouldn't he?
He had scarcely entered before the telephone renewed its irritating clamor, like a fretful child which yelled whenever it heard his footstep. He responded to its fretfulness in very much the same mood, seizing hold of the receiver as though he would shake it into silence. "Yes. Hullo! Hullo! Yes, this is Lord Taborley. What's that? You didn't catch what I It's Lord Taborley speaking, I said."
"I am," she corrected with quiet dignity. "Lord Taborley and I are going on an errand of great importance. I don't want this talked about. You understand? And who'll be driving? Witherall! Then warn Witherall to keep silent." When the butler had withdrawn, she turned to Tabs. "I'm breaking all my precedents for you. I couldn't have told him, if I hadn't had you to keep me in countenance.
If you don't want him, the trouble's ended, and I think Sir Tobias and all of us owe you an apology." Again she laughed. This time some of her old mischief had come back. "You go too fast, Lord Taborley. I shouldn't advise any of you to apologize to me yet. It's true that I don't want him for keeps, but " Tabs guessed the way the ground lay and went back to the question with which he had started.
"The emotional women and silly girls You must have been loved very often, Lord Taborley." To have defended himself against her tender jealousy would have been futile. She was plainly anxious to believe her accusation. Perhaps it flattered her a little. Perhaps it lent him an added touch of glamor. He was wondering how he should satisfy her.
Then in a sly aside, just as she was turning the door-knob to admit him to her father's library, "You've been getting on famously with Maisie, haven't you?" Before he could reply, they were across the threshold. There was a sound as of a rheumaticky hen stirring in its nest. The neck of Sir Tobias craned painfully round the corner of a high-backed chair. "Here's Lord Taborley to see you, Daddy.
Was Mrs. Lockwood in? She would enquire. "And your name, please, sir? Lord Taborley! Certainly." She left him waiting in the hall, while she went to make her fictional enquiries. He was as sure that they were fictional as if he had glanced into the room upstairs where Maisie was making a last anxious inspection before her mirror.
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