Page:The Other House (London, William Heinemann, 1896), Volume 2.djvu/68

54 It seemed to him that the spirit of pleasantry would help them on.

It had its result—it proved contagious. "I would still say so—before her—even if it weren't!" Dennis returned.

Rose took up the joke. "Fortunately it's true—so it saves you a fib."

"It saves me a fib!" Dennis said.

In this way the trick was successfully played—they found their feet; with the added amusement for Tony of hearing the necessary falsehood uttered neither by himself nor by Rose, but by a man whose veracity, from the first, on that earlier day, of looking at him, he had felt to be almost incompatible with the flow of conversation. It was more and more distinct while the minutes elapsed that the secondary effect of her old friend's reappearance was to make Rose shine with a more convenient light; and she met her embarrassment, every way, with so happy an art that Tony was moved to deplore afresh the complication that estranged him from a woman of such gifts. It made up indeed a little for this that he was also never so possessed of his own as when there was something to carry off