of her life? Shall I help you, Mr. Ledsam?”
“I wish you would,” Francis confessed.
They had passed now through the entrance to the Opera House and were in the corridor leading to the grand tier boxes. On every side Sir Timothy had been received with marks of deep respect. Two bowing attendants were preceding them. Sir Timothy leaned towards his companion.
“Because,” he whispered, “I like animals better than human beings.”
Margaret Hilditch, her chair pushed back into the recesses of the box, scarcely turned her head at her father’s entrance.
“I have brought an acquaintance of yours, Margaret,” the latter announced, as he hung up his hat. “You remember Mr. Ledsam?”
Francis drew a little breath of relief as he bowed over her hand. For the second time her inordinate composure had been assailed. She was her usual calm and indifferent self almost immediately, but the gleam of surprise, and he fancied not unpleasant surprise, had been unmistakable.
“Are you a devotee, Mr. Ledsam?” she asked.
“I am fond of music,” Francis answered, “especially this opera.”
She motioned to the chair in the front of the box, facing the stage.
“You must sit there,” she insisted. “I prefer always to remain here, and my father always likes to face the audience. I really believe,” she went on, “that he likes to catch the eye of the journalist who writes little gossipy items, and to see his name in print.”
“But you yourself?” Francis ventured.
“I fancy that my reasons for preferring seclusion should be obvious enough,” she replied, a little bitterly.
“My daughter is inclined, I fear, to be a little morbid,” Sir Timothy said, settling down in his place.
Francis made no reply. A triangular conversation of this sort was almost impossible. The members of the orchestra were already climbing up to their places, in preparation for the overture to the last act. Sir Timothy rose to his feet.
“You will excuse me for a moment,” he begged. “I see a lady to whom I must pay my respects.”
Francis drew a sigh of relief at his departure. He turned at once to his companion.
“Did you mind my coming?” he asked.
“Mind it?” she repeated, with almost insolent nonchalance. “Why should it affect me in any way? My father’s friends come and go. I have no interest in any of them.”
“But,” he protested, “I want you to be interested in me.”
She moved a little uneasily in her place. Her tone, nevertheless, remained icy.
“Could you possibly manage to avoid personalities in your conversation, Mr. Ledsam?” she begged.
“I have tried already to tell you how I feel about such things.”
She was certainly difficult. Francis realised that with a little sigh.
“Were you surprised to see me with your father?” he asked, a little inanely.
“I cannot conceive what you two have found in common,” she admitted.
“Perhaps our interest in you,” he replied. “By-the-bye, I have just seen him perform a quixotic but a very fine action,” Francis said. “He stopped a carter from thrashing his horse; knocked him down, bought the horse from him and sent it home.”
She was mildly interested.
“An amiable side of my father’s character which no one would suspect,” she remarked. “The entire park of his country house at Hatch End is given over to broken-down animals.”
“I am one of those,” he confessed, “who find this trait amazing.”
“And I am another,” she remarked coolly. “If any one settled down seriously to try and understand my father, he would need the spectacles of a De Quincey, the outlook of a Voltaire, and the callousness of a Borgia. You see, he doesn’t lend himself to any of the recognised standards.”
“Neither do you,” he said boldly.
She looked away from him across the House, to where Sir Timothy was talking to a man and woman in one of the ground-floor boxes. Francis recognised them with some surprise—an agricultural Duke and his daughter, Lady Cynthia Milton, one of the most, beautiful and famous young women in London.
“Your father goes far afield for his friends,” Francis remarked.
“My father has no friends,” she replied. “He has many acquaintances. I doubt whether he has a single confidant. I expect Cynthia is trying to persuade him to invite her to his next party at The Walled House.”
“I should think she would fail, won’t she?” he asked.
“Why should you think that?”
Francis shrugged his shoulders slightly.
“Your father’s entertainments have the reputation of being somewhat unique,” he remarked. “You do not, by-the-bye, attend them yourself.”
“You must remember that I have had very few opportunities so far,” she observed. “Besides, Cynthia has tastes which I do not share.”
“As, for instance?”
“She goes to the National Sporting Club. She once travelled, I know, over a hundred miles to go to a bull fight.”
“On the whole,” Francis said, “I am glad that you do not share her tastes.”
“You know her?” Margaret enquired.
“Indifferently well,” Francis replied. “I knew her when she was a child, and we seem to come together every now and then at long intervals. As a debutante she was charming. Lately it seems to me that she has got into the wrong set.”
“What do you call the wrong set?”
He hesitated for a moment.
“Please don’t think that I am laying down the law,” he said. “I have been out so little, the last few years, that I ought not, perhaps, to criticise. Lady Cynthia, however, seems to me to belong to the extreme section of the younger generation, the section who have a sort of craze for the unusual, whose taste in art and living is distorted and bizarre. You know what I mean, don’t you—black drawing-rooms, futurist wall-papers, opium dens and a cocaine box! It’s to some extent affectation, of course, but it’s a folly that claims its victims.”
She studied him for a moment attentively. His leanness was the leanness of muscular strength and condition, his face was full of vigour and determination.
“You at least have escaped the abnormal,” she remarked. “I am not quite sure how the entertainments at The Walled House would appeal to you, but if my father should invite you there, I should advise you not to
