The Halo | Page 6

one of real affection. He was nice, this boy; she liked his honest dark eyes and the expression of his handsome young mouth.
"Tell me," she began presently, "how is your father?"
"He is well, my father, but very nervous. Poor mother!"
"Poor _mother_?"
"But yes. The concert is to be to-morrow, and he is always in a furious state of nerves before he plays. He has been terrific all day."
Brigit sat down. "How curious. One would think that he of all people would be used to playing in public by now," she commented, observing with a tinge of impatience the effect on him of her head outlined against the pale moonlight.
He stood for a moment, unconsciously and irresistibly admiring her. Then, with a little shake of his head, answered her remark. "No, no, he is most nervous always. It is your amateur who knows no stage-fright. Papa," he went on, using the name that to English ears sounds so strangely on grown-up lips, "says he invariably feels as though the audience were wild beasts going to rush at him and tear him to pieces--until he has played one number."
"And after the concert?"
As she spoke dinner was announced, and while they went down the passage to the dining-room at the tail of the little procession, he answered with a laugh, "Oh, afterwards a child could eat out of his hand. He is honey and milk, nectar and--ambrrrrosia!"
The dinner was noisy. Lady Kingsmead always shrieked, as did Mrs. Newlyn, and her other guests either bellowed or screamed, with the exception of Yelverton, who was hungry and said little.
Brigit sat between him and young Joyselle. It was nice to have the boy next her, but his adoration was too obvious to be altogether comfortable.
Freddy Newlyn told some new stories, all delightfully vulgar; Carron gave a realistic _r��sum��_ of a recent French play.
"Awful rot, isn't it?" queried Yelverton suddenly under cover of a roar of laughter. "Why the dickens can't they talk quietly?"
"If you dislike it," she inquired unresentfully, "why do you come?"
"I beg pardon, Lady Brigit, I forgot that you belonged here; I always do forget."
Then Joyselle turned to her, his face so eloquent that she felt like warning him not to betray his secret. "I--I am so happy to be here," he stammered.
Her very black, very well-drawn eyebrows drew a trifle closer together, and with the quickness of his race he saw it.
"Forgive me, Lady Brigit," he said hastily in English. "I am sorry. And--I will not say it again! Only----"
"Only--you are glad? Well, I'm glad, too," she answered slowly. The noisier the others grew as dinner progressed, the closer she and this quiet-voiced boy seemed to draw together.
"Poor old Ponty, too bad he couldn't come," cried Mr. Newlyn, pecking, sparrow-like, at a scrap of food on his plate. "Anything wrong, Lady Kingsmead?"
"No, I don't think so. He telephoned just before dinner--oh!"
She broke off, and everyone turned towards the door as it opened noisily to admit a stout, red-faced man, who stood hesitating on the threshold, not as much apparently from shyness as from a kind of bodily stammer of movement.
"Ponty!"
"Awfully sorry, Tony," explained Lord Pontefract, advancing towards his hostess, "awfully sorry, but that idiot Hendricks got a telephone message wrong, and I thought I couldn't come. So when I found out, I thought 'better late than never,' though I had dined. Please say 'better late than never.'"
"Better late than never," chanted the whole party dissonantly, and room was made for the new-comer between Brigit and Yelverton.
"That fool Shover nearly broke my neck, too," he confided, sitting down and lowering his voice confidentially. "I--I thought for a second I should never see you again."
She looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. He had been drinking. No one had ever seen Oscar Pontefract drunk, but as time went on the honourable body of those who had ever seen him perfectly sober diminished rapidly.
"Haven't seen you for ten days. Damnedest ten days I ever lived through," he continued, helping himself to whisky and soda, "and most infernal ten nights, too. Can't sleep for thinking of you," he added hastily, as she at last turned and looked full at him.
She was twenty-five, and had lived in this milieu for the past seven years. It had begun by disgusting her, then for a time she had been indifferent to it, and now for the last year it had been growing steadily unbearable.
"Dites donc, Lady Brigit," began Joyselle in her left ear, and as she listened to him she instinctively drew away from Pontefract, closer to him. At dessert Kingsmead came sauntering in, less with the air of a little boy allowed to appear with the fruit than of a gently interested gentleman come to take a look at the strange beasts it amused him to keep