He threw back his head and laughed, while she looked at his magnificent throat.
"You never talked like this on the Hohenzollern," she said.
"Madame, I was never alone with you. How could I talk like this? I should not have been properly understood."
Not only in his eyes, but also in this assumption of a certain comradeship and sympathy from which Nigel and Nigel's kind were necessarily excluded, there was a definite insolence that seemed to strike upon and challenge Mrs. Armine, like a glove flung in her face. Would she perhaps have resented it even yesterday? She could not tell. To-night she was ready to welcome it, for to-night she almost hated Nigel. But, apart from her personal anger, Baroudi made an impression upon her that was definite and strong. She felt, she ever seemed to perceive with her eyes, the love of brigandage in him--and had she not been a brigand? There were some ruined men who could have answered that question. And in this man there was a great fund of force and of energy. He threw out an extraordinary atmosphere of physical strength, in which seemed involved a strength that was mental, like dancing motes in a beam of light. Mrs. Armine was a resolute woman, as Meyer Isaacson had at once divined. She felt that here was a human being who could be even more resolute than herself, more persistent, more unyielding, and quite as subtle, quite as cool. Though he was an Eastern man and she was a Western woman, how should each not understand much of the other's character? And as to him--Orientals are readers of brains, if not of souls.
She felt a great sense of relief, as if a balm were laid at evening upon the morning's wound.
"Ruby!"
Baroudi leaned back quietly, looking calm and strong and practical. And this time Mrs. Armine noticed that the basket chair did not creak beneath his movement.
"Is it all right about the dinner, Nigel?"
"I hope so," he said. "But Baroudi mustn't suppose we've got a chef like his."
"I'll leave you for a little while," she said, getting up. "Dinner at a quarter past eight."
"Thank you, madame."
He was standing up.
"You pardon my flannels?"
"I like men in flannels, don't I, Nigel?"
She spoke carelessly, almost absently, and went slowly into the house. Again she had subtly cast around her a gentle atmosphere of rebuke.
On the table in the drawing-room were lying, still in their wrappers, the papers which had come by the morning's post. She took one up, as she passed, and carried it upstairs with her; and when she was in her bedroom she opened it, and glanced quickly through the social news. Ah! there was a paragraph about Lady Harwich!