CHAPTER III
AN ARRANGEMENT FOR SUNDAY

"Elizabeth Aurora Pinsent; that's it. But Elizabeth was too solemn, and Betty was too familiar, and Aurora too absurd. So I'm just Ora."

Lord Bowdon nodded gravely.

"And I think," she went on, lying back on the sofa, "that the world's rather dull, and that you're rather like the world this afternoon."

He did not dispute the point. A man who wants to make love, but is withheld by the sense that he ought not, is at his dullest. Bowdon's state was this or even worse. Ora was a friend of Irene Kilnorton's; how much had she guessed, observed, or been told? Would she think loyalty a duty in herself and disloyalty in him a reproach? That would almost certainly be her mood unless she liked him very much; and she gave no sign of such a liking. On all grounds he was clear that he had better go away at once and not come back again. He thought first of Irene Kilnorton, then of his own peace and interest, lastly of Mr. Jack Fenning; but it must be stated to his credit that he did think quite perceptibly of Jack Fenning. Yet he did not go away immediately.

"You live all alone here?" he asked, looking round the bright little room.

"Yes, I can, you see. That's the advantage of being married."

"I never looked at marriage in that light before."

"No," she laughed. "You've not looked at it in any light, you know; only from the outer darkness."

As his eyes rested on her lying there in graceful repose, he felt a grudge against the way fate was treating him. He wished he were ten or fifteen years younger; he wished he had nothing to lose; he wished he had no conscience. Given these desirable things, he believed that he could break down this indifference and banish this repose. Ora had done nothing to create such a belief; it grew out of his own sturdy and usually justifiable self-confidence.

"Have you a conscience?" he asked her suddenly.

"Oh, yes," she answered, "afterwards."

"That's a harmless variety," he said wistfully.

"Tiresome, though," she murmured with her eyes upturned to the ceiling as though she had forgotten his presence. "Only, you see, something else happens soon and then you don't think any more about it." Ora seemed glad that the cold wind of morality was thus tempered.

Such a remedy was not for the solid-minded man: he did think more about it, notwithstanding that many things happened; and his was not merely the harmless variety of conscience. Ora nestled lower on her cushions, sighed and closed her eyes; she did not treat him with ceremony, if any comfort lay in that. He rose, walked to the window, and looked out. He felt intolerably absurd, but the perception of his absurdity did not help him much. Again he complained of fate. This thing had come just when such things should cease to come, just also when another thing had begun to seem so pleasant, so satisfactory, so almost settled. He was ashamed of himself; as he stood there he regretted his midnight confidence to Ashley Mead a fortnight before. Since then he had made no confidences to Ashley; he had not told him how often he came to this house, nor how often he wished to come. Ora Pinsent's name had not been mentioned between them, although they had met several times over the initial business of launching their Commission.

He turned round and found her eyes on him. She began to laugh, sprang up, ran across the room, laid a hand lightly on his sleeve, and looked in his face, shaking her head with an air of determination.

"You must either go, or be a little more amusing," she said. "What's the matter? Oh, I know! You're in love!"

"I suppose so," he admitted with a grim smile.

"Not with me, though!"

"You're sure of that? Nothing would make you doubt it?"

"Well, I thought it was Irene Kilnorton," she answered; her eyes expressed interest and a little surprise.

"So it was; at least I thought so too," said Bowdon.

"Well, if you think so enough, it's all right," said Ora with a laugh.

"But I'm inclined to think differently now."

"Oh, I shouldn't think differently, if I were you," she murmured. "Irene's so charming and clever. She'd just suit you."

"You're absolutely right," said Bowdon.

"Then why don't you?" She looked at him for a moment and he met her gaze; a slight tint of colour came on her cheeks, and her lips curved in amusement. "Oh, what nonsense!" she cried a moment later and drew back from him till she leant against the opposite shutter and stood there, smiling at him. The next moment she went on: "It is quite nonsense, you know."

Lord Bowdon thought for a moment before he answered her.

"Nonsense is not the same as nothing," he said at last.

"You're not serious about it?" she asked with a passing appearance of alarm. "But of course you aren't." She began to laugh again.

He was relieved to find that he had betrayed nothing more decisive than an inclination to flirt. It would be an excellent thing to sail off under cover of that; she would not be offended, he would be safe.

"Tragically serious," he answered, smiling.

"Oh, yes, I know!" she said. Then she grew grave, frowned a little and looked down into the street. "You talk rather like Jack used to. You reminded me of him for an instant," she remarked. "Though you're not like him really, of course."

"Your husband?" His tone had surprise in it; she had never mentioned Jack before; both the moment and the manner of her present reference to him seemed strange.

"Yes. You never met him, did you? He used to be about London five or six years ago."

"No, I never saw him. Where is he now?"

A shrug of her shoulders and a slight smile gave her answer.

"Why did he go away?"

"Oh, a thousand reasons! It doesn't matter. I liked him, though, once."

"Do you like him now?"

A moment more of gravity was followed by a sudden smile; her eyes sparkled again and she laughed, as she answered,

"No, not just now, thank you, Lord Bowdon. What queer questions you ask, don't you?"

"The answers interest me."

"I don't see why they should."

"Don't you?"

"I mean I don't see how they ought."

"Quite so."

"You're really getting a little bit more amusing," said Ora with a grateful look.

He felt an impulse to be brutal with her, to do, in another sphere of action, very much what Mr. Hazlewood had done when he insisted that a business arrangement must be regarded in a business-like way. Suppose he told her that questions of morals, with their cognate problems, ought to be regarded in a moral way? He would perhaps be a strange preacher, but surely she would forget that in amazement at the novelty of his doctrine!

"How old are you?" he asked her, aghast this time at his question but quite unable to resist it.

She glanced at him for a moment, smiled, and answered simply,

"Twenty-seven last December."

He was remorseful at having extracted an answer, but he bowed to her as he said,

"You've paid me a high compliment. You're right, though; it wasn't impertinence."

"Oh, no, you're all right in that way," she murmured with a careless cordiality. "But why did you want to know?"

"I want to know all about you," he said in a low voice.

Again she looked at him for a moment, growing grave as she looked. Then she laid her hand on his arm again and looked up in his face with a pleading coaxing smile.

"Don't," she said.

There was silence for a moment. Then Lord Bowdon took her hand, kissed it, smiled at her, and asked a prosaic question.

"Where's my hat?" said he.

But that prosaic question made it impossible to sail off under cover of an inclination to flirt; it was not at all in that manner; it lacked the colour, the flourish and the show. As he walked away, Bowdon was conscious that whatever happened to the affair, good or evil, whether it went on or stopped, it must be stamped with a certain genuineness. It could not pass at once from his thoughts; he could not suppose that it would be dismissed immediately from hers.

That he occupied her attention for a little while after he went away happened to be the case, although it was by no means the certain result he imagined. A mind for the moment vacant of new impressions allowed her to wonder, rather idly, why she had said "Don't" so soon; he had done nothing to elicit so direct a prohibition; it had put a stop to a conversation only just becoming interesting, still far from threatening inconvenience. Perhaps she was surprised to find her injunction so effective. She had said the word, she supposed, because she was not much taken with him; or rather because she liked him very definitely in one way, and very definitely not in another, and so had been impelled to deal fairly with him. Besides he had for a moment reminded her of Jack Fenning; that also might have something to do with it. The remembrance of her husband's love-making was not pleasant to her. It recalled the greatest of all the blunders into which her trick of sudden likings had led her, the one apparently irrevocable blunder. It brought back also the memory of old delusions which had made the blunder seem something so very different at the time it was committed. She walked about the room for a few minutes with a doleful look, her lips dragged down and her eyes woeful. It was only five; she did not dine till six. She was supposed to rest this hour; if resting meant thinking of Jack Fenning and Lord Bowdon and of the general harshness of the world, she would have none of it. It occurred to her, almost as an insult, that here was an hour in which she was at leisure and yet nobody seemed to desire her society; such treatment was strange and uncomplimentary.

A ring at the bell scattered her gloom.

"That must be somebody amusing!" she cried, clasping her hands in the joyful confidence that fate had taken a turn. "I wonder who it is!"

The visitor thus favoured by a prejudice of approbation proved to be Ashley Mead. He had come once before, a week ago; three days back Ora had in her own mind accused him of neglect and then charitably congratulated him on indifference. Now she ran to him as though he were the one person in the world she wished to see.

"How charming of you!" she cried. "I was bored to death. I do like people who come at the right time!"