"Oh, Timothy, do shut up!" begged Beulah. "Besides, he's one of Cynthia Haddington's admirers!"
"Well, considering the number of times you've cast it in my teeth that I too was one of her admirers, I can't see what that's got to do with it."
"So you were!" said Beulah, with a touch of spirit. "If you hadn't been pursuing her, we should never have met!"
Mr. Harte sighed. "If dancing three times with a girl to whom one had been presented at a private party, subsequently accepting an invitation to a ball given by her mother, and following this up with a civil call to return thanks, constitutes pursuit, I plead guilty," he said.
"At all events," said Beulah somewhat viciously, "Mrs. Haddington regards you as the best of the eligibles! And if she knew I was having tea with you now she would probably give me the sack!"
"In that case, you trot straight back to Charles Street, ducky, and tell her!" recommended Mr. Harte. "Pausing only to pay the bill here, I will burst off to procure a special licence so that we can be married tomorrow. You shall beguile some long winter's evening for me by recounting to me the circumstances which induced you to take a job as dog's body to that well-preserved corncrake."
"If you want to know," responded Miss Birtley, "Dan Seaton-Carew got me the job! Now how do you feel about marrying me?"
"Shaken but staunch. Seriously, how did that woman muscle on to the fringe of decent society?"
"I don't know, but I think she was sort of sponsored by Lady Nest Poulton," said Beulah. "They're very thick, that I do know."
"What times we do live in, to be sure! Poor old Greystoke has had to sell his place, of course, but I shouldn't have thought an Ellerbeck would have stooped quite as low."
"That must be a thoroughly unfair remark!" said Beulah. "I know nothing about Lord Greystoke's circumstances, but everyone knows that Lady Nest's husband is rolling!"
Just what I was thinking," agreed Timothy. "So what's the tie-up?"
"Why should there be a tie-up?"
"Because, my sweet, feather-headed nit-wit though she may be, and indeed is, the Lady Nest doesn't make a bosom-friend of a brassy-haired widow on the up-and-up without having some strong inducement so to do."
"And they say women are spiteful!" exclaimed Beulah scornfully. "Do you also imagine there's a tie-up between her and Dan Seaton-Carew? She's a friend of his as well."
"Good God!" said Timothy. "I wonder if there's any insanity in the Ellerbecks?"
"Seaton-Carew is considered to be rather an attractive type."
"What does he attract? Pond-life?"
"Apparently, Lady Nest Poulton - if you call her a form of pond-life."
"No, but an unsteady type. Sort of woman who used to go to Limehouse for a thrill in the wicked twenties. That may be it, of course - though I should rather describe your Charles Street set-up as a menagerie."
"Really, Timothy!" she expostulated. "Lots of perfectly respectable people come to the house!"
"I will grant you a sprinkling of fairly harmless types, who probably feel that if Lady Nest knows Mrs. Haddington she must be all right -"
"You don't suppose that Colonel Cartmel or Sir Roderick Vickerstown would be influenced by that, do you?"
"No, my love, I don't. It is well-known that both these aged crocodiles will lend the cachet of their presence to almost any house where the food and the wines are firstclass. Does your respected employer buy exclusively on the black market?"
"If I knew I shouldn't tell you. After all, she does employ me!"
"So she does. What, by the way, is your precise status in the house? Yes, I know she calls you her secretary, but you appear to me to spend half your time chasing round London with a shopping-list."
"Well, I do do her secretarial work, only, of course, there isn't a great deal of it, so I shop for her as well, and see that things are all right when she gives a party, and - oh, anything that crops up!"
"And what," enquired Mr. Harte politely, "are your hours?"
"I don't have regular hours. I'm supposed to leave at six but Mrs. Haddington likes me to be on tap."
"Does she, indeed? You must be pulling down a colossal screw!"
Beulah gave a rather bitter little laugh. "Unfortunately I don't belong to a Union! I get three pounds ten a week - and quite a number of meals. If another female is wanted, with the family; if not, on a tray in the library. Which I prefer!"
She glanced up, and found that Mr. Harte's very blue eyes were fixed on her face in an uncomfortably searching look.
"Why do you stick it?" he asked. "Your employer, to put it frankly, is a bitch; she treats you like mud; and you're at her beck and call, from morning till midnight. What's the big idea?"
"It suits me," she said evasively. Jobs aren't so easily come by these days." She said, too swiftly changing the subject: "Are you coming to the Bridge-party?"
"Yes, are you?"
"I shall be there, of course. Not playing."
"That goes without saying. Who's going to be there? The usual gang?"
"I think so. Eleven tables, plus one or two people who are coming either as scorers, or just to watch. Lady Nest is bringing her husband, which will make it a red-letter evening. Generally he never comes near Charles Street."
"And who shall blame him? I needn't ask if the dashing Dan Seaton-Carew will be present?"
"Of course he will be. Look here, Timothy, are you - do you imagine you've any cause to be jealous of him? Because, if so, get rid of the idea! I thought at first that there was some kind of a liaison between him and Mrs. Haddington, but I seem to have been wrong: it's Cynthia he's after."
"Satyrs and Nymphs. What a repulsive thought! Let us hope it is but a fleeting fancy. I shouldn't think he was a marrying man: his tastes are too - er - catholic. However, if he's spreading his charm over the Shining Beauty, that would no doubt account for the display of temperament young Sydney Butterwick treated the company to on the night we were bidden to Charles Street to listen to the Stalham String Quartet."
"You are disgusting!" said Beulah.
"It wasn't I who was disgusting," Timothy replied. "Not that disgusting is the word I should have chosen to have described any of it. I'm all for light relief, I am, besides being very broad-minded."
"Broad-minded!"
"Yes, but not broad-minded enough to stomach the Charles Street menage as a setting for the girl I'm going to marry."
"You do think I'm an innocent flower, don't you?"
"Yes, and that in spite of all your endeavours to convince me that you have been a hardened woman of the world for years."
She shrugged. "It's not my fault if you persist in cherishing illusions. I told you that you knew nothing about me."
"Oh, not quite as little as that!" said Timothy cheerfully. "I know, for instance, that at some time or another you've taken a nasty knock which has led you to suppose that the world is against you. Also that you have quarrelled with your relations; and that beneath your not-entirely convincing air of having been hard-boiled early in life you are more than a little scared."