Paliser, raising his own spoon, added: "It was Lennox who introduced us.
You knew he was engaged to Miss Austen? Well, she has broken it."
Cassy must have swallowed the soup the wrong way. She coughed, lifted
her napkin and saw a road, long, dark, infinitely fatiguing on which she
was lost. But the soup adjusted itself, the road turned to the right.
Lennox had never so much as said boo! In anger at herself she rubbed her
mouth hard and put the napkin down.
Paliser, who had been tasting and sniffing at a glass, looked at the
butler. "What is this? Take it away. It is not fit for a convict." He
looked over at Cassy. "I am sorry."
"One gets so bored with good wine," said Cassy, who recently had been
reading Disraeli. Yet she said it absently, the unscrambled eggs about
her.
But the saying was new to Paliser, to whom few things were. He relished
it accordingly and the more particularly because of its fine flavour of
high-bred insolence.
From where he sat, he eyed her. Although she was eating, which is never
a very engaging occupation, her face had an air that was noble and
reserved. At the moment, a scruple in which there was a doubt, presented
itself. In view of the coming draft act, it occurred to him that he
might have gone the wrong way about it. But the scruple concerned merely
the expediency of the adventure. It was not related to his conscience.
He had none.
Now, though, a new decanter was before him; he tried it, drank of it,
judged it decent and drank again. Being decent, it was not heady. It did
not affect him. Cassy had done that. In her was a bouquet which the
vineyard of youth and beauty alone produces. He had hankered for it.
Now, like the decanter, it was before him. He could drink his fill. Then
like the other wine, he could send it away.