Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/96

 garden railing now, with the romantic-looking young Italian beside her, she was really giving a little performance, so to speak, for the Englishman's benefit; though not by the slightest glance in his direction did she seem to take cognizance of him, and she knew that from where he sat he could not hear what she said. But she thought the sound of her voice reached him, and she was careful to keep it musical, just as she kept her posture and gestures graceful, and appeared all the while to be deeply absorbed in the young Liana. Her absorption in him had markedly increased when they came out of the hotel and into the scope of Orbison's view, for Claire had long since discovered her absorbed look was the most becoming expression she knew how to wear.

She wore it now—for its effect upon both gentlemen, of course, but more for its effect upon the one at a distance than for that upon the one at her side; and in this there was an ironical fatality that haunted her. She could never understand it, and often gasped in her hopeless puzzlement over it. No matter what the comparative merits and beauties of any two gentlemen might be, she was forever doomed, so it seemed, to find herself more interested in the one at a distance than in the one at her side.