Part 30 (2/2)

Dressed in her perfectly plain ready-made walking frock, her own shoes and a neat little hat that she had bought in Queen's Road, Bayswater, Lola came upstairs quickly with her eyes on Feo's face. She seemed hardly to be able to hold back the words that were trembling on her lips. It was obvious that she had been crying; her lids were red and swollen. But she didn't look unhappy or miserable, as a girl might if everything had gone wrong; nor in the least self-conscious. She wore neither her expression as lady's maid, nor that of the young widow to whom some one had given London; but of a mother whose boy was in trouble and must be got out of it, at once, _please_, and helped back to his place among other good boys.

”Will you come down to your room, Lady Feo?” she asked. ”Mr. Lytham will be here in a few minutes and I want you to see him.”

Lytham-young Lochinvar! How priceless if he were the man for whom she had dressed this child up.

”Why, of course. But what's the matter, Lola? You've been crying. You look fey.”

Lola put her hand on Feo's arm, urgently. ”Please come down,” she said.

”I want to tell you something before Mr. Lytham comes.”

Well, this seemed to be her favor-granting day, as well as one of those during which Fate had recognized her as being on his book. First Edmund and then Lola,-there was not much to choose between their undisguised egotism. And the lady's maid business,-that was all over, plainly.

George Lytham,-who'd have thought it? If Lola were in trouble, she had a friend in that house.

And so, without any more questions, she went back to her futuristic den which, after her brief talk with Fallaray, seemed to belong to a very distant past. But before Lola could begin to tell her story, a footman made his appearance and said that Mr. Lytham was in the hall.

”Show him in here,” said Feo and turned to watch the door.

She wondered if she would be able to tell from his expression what was the meaning of her being brought into this,-a disinclination on his part to take the blame, or an earnest desire to do what was right under the circ.u.mstances? She never imagined the possibility of his not knowing that Lola was a lady's maid dressed in the feathers of the jay. Unlike Peter Chalfont, who accepted without question, Lytham held things up to the light and examined their marks.

There was, however, nothing uncomfortable in his eyes. On the contrary, he looked more than ever like the captain, Feo thought, of a County Cricket Club, healthy, confident and fully alive to his enormous responsibility. He wore a suit of thin blue flannels, the M. C. C. tie under a soft low collar, and brown shoes that had become almost red from long and expert treatment. He didn't shake hands like a German, with a stiff deference contradicted by a mackerel eye, or with the tender effusion of an actor who imagines that women have only to come under his magnetism to offer themselves in sacrifice. Bolt upright, with his head thrown back, he shook hands with an honest grip, without deference and without familiarity, like a good cricketer.

”How do you do, Lady Feo,” he said, in his most masculine voice. ”It's kind of you to see us.” Then he turned to Lola with a friendly smile.

”Your telephone message caught me just as I was going to dash off for a game of tennis after a hard day, Madame de Breze,” he added.

Oh, so this was another of the de Breze episodes, was it, like the one with Beauty Chalfont. Curiosity came hugely to Feo's rescue. Here, at any rate, was a break in her run of bad luck, very welcome. What on earth could be the meaning of this quaint meeting,-George Lytham, the earnest worker pledged to reconstruction, and this enigmatic child, who might have stood for Joan of Arc? If Lola had caught Lytham and brought him to Dover Street to receive substantiation, Feo was quite prepared to lie on her behalf. What a joke to palm off the daughter of a Queen's Road jeweler on the early-Victorian mother of the worthy George!

”Well?” she said, looking from one to the other with a return of her impish delight in human experimentation.

”Mr. Lytham can explain this better than I can,” said Lola quietly.

”I'm not so sure about that, but I'll do my best.”

He drew a chair forward and sat down. Under ordinary circ.u.mstances, where there was the normal amount of happiness, or even the mutual agreement to give and take that goes with the average marriage, his task would have been a difficult one. But in the case of Feo and his chief he felt able to deal with the matter entirely without self-consciousness, or delicacy in the choice of words.

”I needn't worry you with any of the details of the new political situation, Lady Feo. You know them, probably, as well as I do. But what you don't know, because the moment isn't yet ripe for the publication of our plans, is that Mr. Fallaray has been chosen to lead the Anti-waste Party, which is concentrating its forces to rout the old gang out of politics at the next General Election, give Parliament back its lost prestige, and do away with the pernicious influence of the Press Lords.

A big job, by Jove, which Fallaray alone can achieve.”

”Well?” repeated Feo, wondering what in the world this preamble had to do with the case in question.

”Well, at the end of the meeting of my party yesterday, I was sent down to Chilton Park to tell Mr. Fallaray our plans. I was stultified to be told that he had decided to chuck politics.”

”And go in for love. Yes, I know. But what has this got to do with Lola,-with Madame de Breze?”

That was the point that beat Feo, the thing that filled her with a sort of impatient astonishment. Was this uncommunicative girl, who seemed to her to be so essentially feminine, whose metier in life was obviously to purr under the touch of a masculine hand, who had been given a holiday to go on a love chase with Chalfont, presumably, somehow connected with politics? It was incredible.

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