Page:Herbert Jenkins - The Rain Girl.djvu/138



HILST Beresford was on the way to Folkestone with such expedition as the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway could muster, Lady Drewitt was driving back to Curzon Street with Lord Drewitt seated beside her. On his face was the look of deep depression of a man who has been torn from his bed some six hours before his normal hour for rising. Arrived at Curzon Street, Lady Drewitt marched straight to the morning-room and seated herself in her customary chair, whilst her nephew wearily dropped his unhappy body upon one opposite.

"Well!" She folded her hands in her lap with an air of grim expectancy. "My dear aunt," he said wearily; "it can never be well with a man who has two thousand a year and expensive tastes."

"If you depended upon yourself, you would have only your expensive tastes without the two thousand a year," was the retort.

Drewitt glanced at her with interest.

"You are becoming almost epigrammatical," he said with a lazy smile, the first that had broken through his mask of suffering that morning. 134