Page:When It Was Dark.djvu/267

Rh "Wonderful, wonderful!" he said in a hushed voice. "There, take it away and bring me an olive. Then I will go down-stairs and wait for my friend in the smoking-room. You will serve the soup at five minutes past eight."

He got up from the table and moved silently over the heavy carpet to the door.

It was about seven o'clock. At eight Constantine Schuabe was coming to the Sheridan Club to dine.

Sir Robert sat in the smoking-room with a tiny cigarette of South American tobacco, wrapped in maize leaf and tied round the centre with a tiny cord of green silk. His face expressed nothing but the most absolute repose. His correspondence with life was at that moment as complete as the most perfect health and discriminating luxury could make it.

He stretched out his feet to the blaze and idly watched the reflection in the points of his shining boots.

The room was quite silent now. A few men sat about reading the evening papers, and there was a subdued hum of talk from a table where two men were playing a casual game of chess, in which neither of them seemed much interested. A large clock upon the oak mantel-shelf ticked with muffled and soothing regularity.

Llwellyn picked up a sixpenny illustrated paper, devoted to amusements and the lighter side of life, and lazily opened it.

His eye fell upon a double-page article interspersed with photographs of actors and actresses. The article was a summing-up of the year's events on the lighter stage by an accepted expert in such matters. He read as follows:

"The six Trocadero girls whom I remember in Paris recently billed as 'The Cocktails,' never forget that