rise.
Although she was so calmly, so healthily eating, her eyes stole round at
Courtier. This quick look seemed to Lord Dennis perturbed, as if
something were exciting her. Then Harbinger spoke, and she turned to
answer him. Her face was calm now, faintly smiling, a little eager,
provocative in its joy of life. It made Lord Dennis think of his own
youth. What a splendid couple! If Babs married young Harbinger there
would not be a finer pair in all England. His eyes travelled back to
Courtier. Manly enough! They called him dangerous! There was a look of
effervescence, carefully corked down--might perhaps be attractive to a
girl! To his essentially practical and sober mind, a type like Courtier
was puzzling. He liked the look of him, but distrusted his ironic
expression, and that appearance of blood to the head. Fellow--no
doubt--that would ride off on his ideas, humanitarian! To Lord Dennis
there was something queer about humanitarians. They offended perhaps his
dry and precise sense of form. They were always looking out for cruelty
or injustice; seemed delighted when they found it--swelled up, as it
were, when they scented it, and as there was a good deal about, were
never quite of normal size. Men who lived for ideas were, in fact, to
one for whom facts sufficed always a little worrying! A movement from
Barbara brought him back to actuality. Was the possessor of that crown of
hair and those divine young shoulders the little Babs who had ridden with
him in the Row? Time was certainly the Devil! Her eyes were searching
for something; and following the direction of that glance, Lord Dennis
found himself observing Miltoun. What a difference between those two!
Both no doubt in the great trouble of youth; which sometimes, as he knew
too well, lasted on almost to old age. It was a curious look the child
was giving her brother, as if asking him to help her. Lord Dennis had
seen in his day many young creatures leave the shelter of their freedom
and enter the house of the great lottery; many, who had drawn a prize and
thereat lost forever the coldness of life; many too, the light of whose
eyes had faded behind the shutters of that house, having drawn a blank.
The thought of 'little' Babs on the threshold of that inexorable saloon,
filled him with an eager sadness; and the sight of the two men watching
for her, waiting for her, like hunters, was to him distasteful. In any
case, let her not, for Heaven's sake,