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A curious, almost ghastly glance passed involuntarily between the Tressilvains; Portlaw, who was busy lighting a cigar, did not notice it, but Malcourt laughed lightly and ran over the score, adding it up with a nimble accuracy that seemed to stun his relatives. "Why, look what's here!" he exclaimed, genially displaying a total that, added, balanced all Portlaw's gains and losses to date.
For a full minute, in strained silence, the concentrated gaze of the Tressilvains was focused upon the guileless countenance of Malcourt; and discovered nothing except a fatuous cordiality. Lady Tressilvain drew a deep, noiseless breath and glanced at her husband.
That is to say, Lady Tressilvain did the discussing; Malcourt, bland, amiable, remained uncommunicatively polite, parrying everything so innocently that his sister, deceived, became plainer in her questions concerning the fortune he was supposed to have married, and more persistent in her suggestions of a winter in New York a delightful and prolonged family reunion, in which the Tressilvains were to figure as distinguished guests and virtual pensioners of everybody connected with his wife's family.
She smiled. So he went away, rather satiated with the pleasures of self-denial; but the lightly latent mockery soon broke out again in a smile as he reached the street. "What a mess!" he grinned to himself. "The Tressilvains at Portlaw's! And Wayward! and Shiela and Virginia and that awful Louis Malcourt! It only wants Hamil to make the jolliest little hell of it.
"Shiela," he said, "why don't you pay your family a visit?" She shook her head. "You're afraid they might suspect that you are not particularly happy?" "Yes.... It was wrong to have Gray and Cecile here. It was fortunate you were away. But they saw the Tressilvains." "What did they think of 'em?" inquired Malcourt. "What do you suppose they would think?" "Quite right. Well, don't worry.
But he opened the gate, disdaining to speak to them, and when they knew him, it was a pack of very humble, wet, and penitent hounds that came wagging up alongside. He let them wag unnoticed. Lights burned in his house, one in Shiela's apartments, several in the west wing where the Tressilvains were housed.
Piloted by Malcourt, the Tressilvains, thickly shod and water-proofed, tramped about with rod and creel and returned for luncheon where their blunt criticisms on the fishing aroused Portlaw's implacable resentment.
Portlaw almost capered with surprise and relief when at breakfast he learned that the Tressilvains had departed. "Oh, everything is coming everybody's way," said Malcourt gaily "like the last chapter of a bally novel the old-fashioned kind, Billy, where Nemesis gets busy with a gun and kind Providence hitches 'em up in ever-after blocks of two.
A little later the Tressilvains and Shiela started across the lawn to their own apartments, and Malcourt went with them to hold an umbrella over his wife. In the lower hall they separated with scarcely a word, but Malcourt detained his brother-in-law by a significant touch on the arm, and drew him into the library. "So you're leaving to-morrow?" he asked. "What?" said Tressilvain.
Portlaw was perhaps the sounder player, Malcourt certainly the more brilliant; and now, for the first time since the advent of the Tressilvains, the cards Portlaw held were good ones. "What a nasty thing to do!" said Lady Tressilvain sharply, as her brother's finesse went through, and with it another rubber. "It was horrid, wasn't it, Helen?
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