He looked at her suspiciously, but she was no longer smiling, and when she spoke there was no amusement or superiority in her tone.
“Isn’t it a marvellous house?” she said.
He nodded.
“Wonderful,” he agreed. “Very old, I should say. But it’s very lonely,” he added, his practical nature coming out in spite of himself. “Probably most inconvenient … I’m glad it’s not mine.”
The girl laughed softly.
“Unromantic soul,” she said.
Abbershaw looked at her and reddened and coughed and changed the conversation.
“I say,” he said, under the cover of the general prittle-prattle all around them, “do you know who everyone is? I only recognize Wyatt and young Michael Prenderby over there. Who are the others? I arrived too late to be introduced.”
The girl shook her head.
“I don’t know many myself,” she murmured. “That’s Anne Edgeware sitting next to Wyatt—she’s rather pretty, don’t you think? She’s a Stage-cum-Society person; you must have heard of her.”
Abbershaw glanced across the table, where a striking young woman in a pseudo-Victorian frock and side curls sat talking vivaciously to the young man at her side. Some of her conversation floated across the table to him. He turned away again.
“I don’t think she’s particularly pretty,” he said with cheerful inconsequentialness. “Who’s the lad?”
“That boy with black hair talking to her? That’s Martin. I don’t know his other name, he was only introduced to me in the hall. He’s just a stray young man, I think.” She paused and looked round the table.
“You know Michael, you say. The little round shy girl next him is Jeanne, his fiancée; perhaps you’ve met her.”
George shook his head.
“No,” he said, “but I’ve wanted to; I take a personal interest in Michael”—he glanced at the fair, sharp-featured young man as he spoke—“he’s only just qualified as an M.D., you know, but he’ll go far. Nice chap, too … Who is the young prizefighter on the girl’s left?”
Meggie shook her sleek bronze head at him reprovingly as she followed his glance to the young giant a little higher up the table. “You mustn’t say that,” she whispered. “He’s our star turn this party. That’s Chris Kennedy, the Cambridge rugger blue.”
“Is it?” said Abbershaw with growing respect, “Fine-looking man.”
Meggie glanced at him sharply, and again the faint smile appeared on her lips and the brightness in her dark eyes. For all his psychology, his theorizing, and the seriousness with which he took himself, there was very little of George Abbershaw’s mind that was not apparent to her, but for all that the light in her eyes was a happy one and the smile on her lips unusually tender.
“That,” she said suddenly, following the direction of his gaze and answering his unspoken thought, “that’s a lunatic.”
George turned to her gravely.
“Really?” he said.
She had the grace to become a little confused.
“His name is Albert Campion,” she said. “He came down in Anne Edgeware’s car, and the first thing he did when he was introduced to me was to show me a conjuring trick with a two-headed penny—he’s quite inoffensive, just a silly ass.”
Abbershaw nodded and stared covertly at the fresh-faced young man with the tow-coloured hair and the foolish, pale-blue eyes behind tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles, and wondered where he had seen him before.
The slightly receding chin and mouth so unnecessarily full of teeth was distinctly familiar. “Albert Campion?” he repeated under his breath. “Albert Campion? Campion? Campion?” But still his memory would not serve him, and he gave up calling on it and once more his inquisitive glance flickered round the table.
Since the uncomfortable little moment ten minutes ago when the Colonel had observed him scrutinizing his face, he had been careful to avoid the head of the table, but now his attention was caught by a man who sat next to his host, and for an instant he stared unashamedly.
The man was a foreigner, so much was evident at a glance; but that in itself was not sufficient to interest him so particularly.
The man was an arresting type. He was white-haired, very small and delicately made, with long graceful hands which he used a great deal in his conversation, making gestures, swaying his long, pale fingers gracefully, easily.
Under the sleek white hair which waved straight back from a high forehead his face was grey, vivacious, and peculiarly wicked.
George could think of no other word to describe the thin-lipped mouth that became one-sided and O-shaped in speech, the long thin nose, and more particularly the deep-set, round, black eyes which glistened and twinkled under enormous shaggy grey brows.
George touched Meggie’s arm.
“Who is that?” he said.
The girl looked up and then dropped her eyes hurriedly.
“I don’t know,” she murmured, “save that his name is Gideon or something, and he is a guest of the Colonel’s—nothing to do with our crowd.”
“Weird-looking man,” said Abbershaw.
“Terrible!” she said, so softly and with such earnestness that he glanced at her sharply and found her face quite grave.
She laughed as she saw his expression.
“I’m a fool,” she said. “I didn’t realize what an impression the man had made on me until I spoke. But he looks a wicked type, doesn’t he? His friend, too, is rather startling, don’t you think—the man sitting opposite to him?”
The repetition of the word “wicked,” the epithet which had arisen in his own mind, surprised Abbershaw, and he glanced covertly up the table again.
The man seated opposite Gideon, on the other side of the Colonel, was striking enough indeed.
He was a foreigner, grossly fat, and heavily jowled, and there was something absurdly familiar about him. Suddenly it dawned upon George what it was. The man was the living image of the little busts of Beethoven which are sold at music shops. There were the same heavy-lidded eyes, the same broad nose, and to cap it all the same shock of hair, worn long and brushed straight back from the amazingly high forehead.
“Isn’t it queer?” murmured Meggie’s voice at his side. “See—he has no expression at all.”
As soon
