“The once-over is better,” returned Hanaud. “It is a phrase of the fashionables in New York? Yes. From the Bowery? Yes. Good, I use him.”
Both Bryce Carter and Joyce Whipple had moved a good deal in Hanaud’s society during the last week or two, and just accepted in grateful silence his promise to use their idiom, without discussing the residential quarter of the fashionables of New York.
“It will be perhaps better to allow Joyce to tell her story without interruption,” Mr. Ricardo suggested coldly, and Hanaud bowed his head.
“For the future,” he said, and he had clearly enjoyed some further conversation with Mr. Ricardo’s chauffeur, “I hold my blinking tongue.”
“That is sufficient,” said Mr. Ricardo. “Joyce, proceed!”
And Joyce proceeded.
“I was a disturbance, you see. Diana was nervous, with lapses into dreams. I was all at once a stranger to her. With Evelyn and Monsieur de Mirandol I was at once unpopular. On the other hand, Robin Webster showed me a good deal of attention. I had the misfortune to come over at him from the first,” and under Mr. Ricardo’s cold eye Hanaud repressed himself with extreme difficulty. “That relationship continued through the evening. Two young men from the neighbourhood dined at the château, and we danced afterwards upon the terrace to the gramophone until eleven o’clock. Robin Webster was troublesome, for I really didn’t want to dance with him, though he danced very well. And as often as I did, I could see Evelyn Devenish glowering at me. Once, indeed, when she was quite close to Robin Webster and myself she refused brusquely an invitation to dance and, raising her voice so that Robin Webster could hear, said: ‘It is hot. I shall stroll down to the river.’
“She went down the steps, waited without turning her head, and then wandered alone across the lawn. Robin Webster took no notice whatever. His face was smooth as a mask. Diana, in the library, put on a new record and set it spinning.
“ ‘You must leave me,’ I said to Robin Webster. ‘I am not here to make trouble. Please go!’ and I nodded to where Evelyn’s white dress glimmered against the dark grass. Webster’s eyes followed mine. I have never seen a face so harden into contempt as his did at that moment.
“ ‘She doesn’t know the difference between being a man’s master and a man’s mistress, and she has got to learn,’ he said. I recoiled from him, and at once his whole expression changed. He became piteous, appealing. ‘You think that hateful! I am over-tried. The last thing in the world I want to do is to make you hate me,’ and his eyes slid over me from my head to my shoes—oh, odiously! He was making an inventory of me and my clothes. He said with a sudden passion which took me aback: ‘You have only to say the word, and I’ll give up this dance and go down there to Evelyn.’
“But I wasn’t going to tumble into that trap. If I did say the word, I—how shall I put it?—I established a relationship, I almost put myself under an obligation. He could come to me and plead: ‘The moment you told me to sacrifice myself, I did it. Now, when I ask the tiniest little thing you turn me down.’ No, nothing of that for Joyce Whipple. I answered quickly: ‘I haven’t the slightest intention to interfere, and you have danced too often with me as it is. I hate being conspicuous. Good night!’
“I turned away to Diana and told her that I was tired and was going to bed. Diana looked at me for a moment, as though she was not quite sure who I was and what I was doing there. Then she waked up.
“ ‘I’ll go up with you and see that you’ve got everything, Joyce,’ she said. ‘I am delighted you could spare the time to pay me a visit here.’
“She slipped her arm through mine, and Robin Webster, who was at my elbow, afraid no doubt lest I should give him away, had the nerve to ask—oh! in the melting voice of a musical-comedy lover: ‘But you’ll come back! I’ll wait for you here. This is a wonderful waltz. Strauss wrote it for you and me!’
“Diana hurried me up to my room, barely glanced round it, and said: ‘Yes, I see you have everything,’ and the next moment I heard her running down the stairs.
“Now, I really was tired, and being a healthy young woman I should naturally have slept from the moment when I got into bed until Marianne trotted in with my coffee. But, you see, I had come out to the Château Suvlac with a particular object, and my uneasiness was not at all relieved by what I had seen that evening. On the contrary. Diana was so unlike the Diana I used to know that I was alarmed. I thought Monsieur de Mirandol quite impossible and Robin Webster quite intolerable. I had a feeling, too, though, of course, I might have brought that with me, that something was being planned against Diana and that my presence interfered with the plan.
“I must have fallen asleep whilst I was worrying over these problems, but so restlessly that a mere murmur of voices underneath my window was sufficient to wake me up. The moon had now risen and my room was so bright that I could read my watch without turning on the lamp. The time was a few minutes past midnight. The gramophone had stopped. I heard no sound indeed at all but these voices whispering and murmuring upon the terrace, and an occasional quick ‘H’sh! H’sh!’ when one of them rose upon a higher note. Then my name was uttered. ‘She is staying
