Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/78

62 tion to realize that, as the three talked together, this girl was defending him.

Not him alone, of course, or him chiefly. It was Benjamin Corvet, her friend, whom she was defending primarily; yet it was Alan too; and all went on without a word about Benjamin Corvet or his affairs being spoken.

Dinner was announced, and they went into the great dining-room, where the table with its linen, silver, and china gleamed under shaded lights. The oldest and most dignified of the three men servants who waited upon them in the dining-room Alan thought must be a butler—a species of creature of whom Alan had heard but never had seen; the other servants, at least, received and handed things through him, and took their orders from him. As the silent-footed servants moved about, and Alan kept up a somewhat strained conversation with Mrs. Sherrill—a conversation in which no reference to his own affairs was yet made—he wondered whether Constance and her mother always dressed for dinner in full evening dress as now, or whether they were going out. A word from Constance to her mother told him this latter was the case, and while it did not give complete answer to his internal query, it showed him his first glimpse of social engagements as a part of the business of life. In spite of the fact that Benjamin Corvet, Sherrill's close friend, had disappeared—or perhaps because he had disappeared and, as yet, it was not publicly known—their and Sherrill's engagements had to be fulfilled.

What Sherrill had told Alan of his father had been iterating itself again and again in Alan's thoughts; now he recalled that Sherrill had said that his daughter