A Lost Leader Part 28

He drew a letter from his pocket.

"You may as well see it yourself," he remarked. "For reasons which you may doubtless understand, I have always kept on good terms with Mrs.

Phillimore, and she was to have dined with me and some other friends to-morrow night. Here is a note which I had from her yesterday. Will you read it?"

Berenice held it between her finger tips. There were only a few lines, and she read them at a glance.

Sloane Gardens, _Tuesday_.

My dear Sir Leslie,

I am so sorry, but I must scratch for to-morrow night. L. is going North on some mysterious expedition, and I am afraid that he will want me to go with him. In fact, he has already said so. Ask me again some time, won't you?

Yours ever, Blanche Phillimore.

Berenice folded up the letter and returned it.

"It is a little extraordinary," she remarked. "I am much obliged to you for showing me this. If you do not mind, we will talk of something else.

Look, there is Clara Mannering alone under the trees. Go and talk to her."

Berenice touched the checkstring, and Borrowdean was forced to depart.

She smiled upon him graciously enough, but she spoke not another word about Mannering. Borrowdean was obliged to leave her without knowing whether he had lost or gained the trick.

Clara Mannering received him not altogether graciously. As a matter of fact, she was looking for some one else. They strolled along, talking almost in monosyllables. Borrowdean found time to notice the change which even these few months in London had wrought in her. She was still graceful in her movements, but a smart dressmaker had contrived to make her a perfect reproduction of the recognized type of the moment. She had lost her delicate colouring. There was a certain hardness in her young face, a certain pallor and listlessness in her movements which Borrowdean did not fail to note. He tried to lead the conversation into more personal channels.

"We seem to have met very little during the last month," he said. "I have scarcely had an opportunity to ask you whether you find the life here as pleasant as you hoped, whether it has realized your expectations."

"Does anything ever do that?" she asked, a little flippantly. "It is different, of course. I do not think that I should be willing to go back to Blakely, at any rate."

"You have made a great many friends," he remarked. "I hear of you continually."

"A host of acquaintances," she remarked. "I do not think that I have materially increased the circle of my friends. I hear of you too, Sir Leslie, very often. It seems that people give you a good deal of credit for inducing my uncle to come back into politics."

"I certainly did my best to persuade him," Sir Leslie answered, smoothly.

"If I had known how much anxiety he was going to cause us I might perhaps have been a little less keen."

"Anxiety!" she repeated.

"Yes! Do you know where he is now?"

"I have no idea," Clara answered. "All that I do know is that he has gone away for three weeks, and that I am going to stay with the d.u.c.h.ess till he comes back. It is very nice of her, and all that, of course, but I feel rather as though I were going into prison. The d.u.c.h.ess isn't exactly the modern sort of chaperon."

Borrowdean nodded sympathetically.

"And consider my anxiety," he remarked. "Your uncle has gone North to consider the true position of the labouring cla.s.ses. Now Mr. Mannering is a brilliant politician and a sound thinker, but he is also a man of sentiment. They will drug him with it up there. He will probably come back with half a dozen new schemes, and we don't want them, you know. He ought to be speaking at Glasgow and Leeds this week. He simply ignores his responsibilities. He yields to a sudden whim and leaves us _plantes la_."

She seemed scarcely to have heard the conclusion of his sentence. Her attention was fixed upon a group of men who were talking near.

"Do you know--isn't that Major Bristow?" she asked Borrowdean, abruptly.

Borrowdean put up his gla.s.s.

"Looks like him," he admitted.

"I should be so much obliged," she said, "if you would tell him that I wish to see him. I have a message for his sister," she concluded, a little lamely.

Borrowdean did as he was asked. He noticed the slight impatience of the man as he delivered his message, and the flush with which she greeted him. Then, with a little shrug of the shoulders, he pursued his way.

CHAPTER VIII

A PAGE FROM THE PAST

She swept into the room, humming a light opera tune, bringing with her the usual flood of perfumes, suggestion of cosmetics, a vivid apparition of the artificial. Her skirts rustled aggressively, her voice was just one degree too loud. Mannering rose to his feet a little wearily.

She looked at him with raised eyebrows.

"Heavens!" she exclaimed. "What have you been doing with yourself, Lawrence? You look like a ghost!"

"I am quite well," he answered, calmly.

"Then you don't look it," she answered, bluntly. "Where have you been for the last few weeks?"

"Up in the North," he answered. "It was very hot, and I had a great deal to do. I suppose I am suffering, like the rest of us, from a little overwork."

She spread herself out in a chair opposite to him.

"Don't stand," she said; "you fidget me. I have something to say to you."

"So I gathered from your note," he remarked.

"You haven't hurried."

"I only got back to London last night," he answered. "I could scarcely come sooner, could I?"

"I suppose not," she admitted.

Then for a moment or two she was silent. She was watching him a little curiously.

"Is this true?" she asked, "this rumour?"

"Won't you be a little more explicit?" he begged.

"They say that you are going to marry the d.u.c.h.ess of Lenchester!"

"It is true," he answered.