Druze took the transparent silk coat and handed it to the second footman; the Princess was already stamping up the stairs. She pushed open the door and walked in unannounced, and Lady Raytham, standing by the fire, her head pillowed on her arm, looked up, startled.
“I’m so awfully sorry. Push the light, Anita; the button is by your hand. Well?”
The Princess Anita Bellini struggled unaided out of her tweed coat and threw it over the back of a chair, jerked off her hat with another movement, and tossed it after the coat.
People who saw Anita Bellini for the first time gazed at her in a little awe; there was a certain ruthless strength in every line, every feature. She was something more than fifty and was just under six feet in height.
The masculinity of the powerful face was emphasized by the grey hair cut close in an Eton crop and the rimless monocle which never left her eye. Between her white teeth she gripped a long amber holder, in which a cigarette was burning.
Her speech was direct, abrupt, almost shocking in its frankness.
“Greta?”
She jerked the end of the cigarette-holder towards the door.
“Being fussed over by Druze. That woman would ogle a dustman! She’s that age. It is a horrible thing to have been pretty once and to have produced certain reactions. You can never believe that the spirit has evaporated.”
Jane Raytham smiled.
“They say you were an awfully pretty girl, Nita—” she began.
“They lie,” said Princess Anita calmly. “Russells used to retouch my photographs till there was nothing left but the background.”
Greta floated in, hands outstretched, her big, red mouth opened ecstatically.
“Darling!” she breathed, and caught both Jane’s hands in hers. Anita Bellini’s fleshy nose wrinkled in a sneer.
And yet she should have grown accustomed to Mrs. Gurden, for ecstasy was Greta’s normal condition. She had that habit of touching people, holding them by the arms, stooping to look up into their faces with her big, black eyes that sometimes squinted a little.
She had been pretty, but now her face was long and a little haggard, the face of a woman who was so afraid of missing something that she could not spare the time to sleep. Her lips were heavily carmined, her eyes carefully made up as though she were still expecting a call to return to the chorus from which Anita had rescued her.
“My lovely Jane! Exquisite as usual. That dress—don’t tell me! Chenel, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Jane Raytham scarcely looked down. “No, I think it is a dress I bought in New York last year.”
Greta shook her head speechlessly.
Anita Bellini blew out a smoke ring and tapped off the ash in the fireplace.
“Greta lays it on thick when she lays it at all,” she said, and cast a critical eye over her hostess. “You’re peaky, Jane. Missing your husband?”
“Terribly.”
The irony of tone was not lost on Anita.
“Raytham—what is he doing? The man is ill of money and yet won’t take a day off making it. Where the—oh, here he is.”
Druze wheeled in the tea-wagon.
“Give me a whisky and soda, Druze, or I’ll perish.”
She drank the contents of the goblet at a gulp and handed back the glass.
Anita fixed her monocle more firmly and lit another cigarette. The door closed behind the butler.
“Druze wears well, Jane. Where did you get him?”
Lady Raytham looked up quickly.
“Does he? I scarcely notice him. He has always been the same so long as I can remember. He was with Lord Everreed before.”
“That goes back a few years; I remember him when he was a young man.”
The Princess had an unhappy habit of smiling with her mouth closed. It was not very pretty.
“It is funny how age comes—thirty to fifty goes like a flash of lightning.”
She changed the subject abruptly and talked about her call of the afternoon.
“I went for bridge and got a string quartette playing every kind of music except one with a tune in it.”
“It was lovely!” breathed Greta, her eyes screwed tight in an agony of admiration.
“It was rotten,” retorted the grey-haired Anita. “And more rotten because my sister-in-law was there. The woman’s narrowness depresses me.”
Lady Raytham’s eyes had returned to the fire.
“Oh!” she said.
“I asked her what she was going to do about Peter—thank heavens she has a little sense there! Peter has been wiped off the slate. Margaret would not even discuss him. The only person who believes in him is Everreed—but Everreed was always a simpleton. He would never have prosecuted, but the bank forced his hand.”
She said this with some satisfaction. She had never liked her nephew, and Peter hated her—hated her gibes at him when he, the son of a wealthy man, had preferred a private secretaryship with that great Parliamentarian, Viscount Everreed, to entering his late father’s bank. She had sat in court with a contemptuous smile on her lips when the haggard boy had been sentenced for forging his employer’s name to a cheque for five thousand pounds.
The woman by the fire stirred her tea absently.
“When does—”
“He come out? About now, I think. Let me see, he had seven years, and they tell me that these people get a remission of sentence for good conduct—three months in every year. Why, the Lord knows. We pay enormous sums to catch ’em, and as soon as they are safe under lock and key we go tinkering with the lock to get them out.”
“Disgraceful!” murmured Greta.
But Jane Raytham did not hear her.
“I wonder what he will do?” she mused. “Life will go pretty hardly for a man like Peter—”
“Rubbish!” Anita snapped the word. “For goodness’ sake don’t get melancholy about Peter! He has been five years in prison, and at Dartmoor—or wherever he is—they teach men to use their hands to do something besides forge cheques. He will probably make an excellent farm hand.”
Lady Raytham shivered.
“Ugh! How awful!”
The Princess smiled.
“Peter Dawlish is just fool. He belongs to the kind of human that is made for other people’s service. If you
