Davenant, who had been paying his respects to Miss Guion, charged forward, with hand outstretched and hearty:  “Happy to meet you, Colonel.  Glad to welcome you to our country.”

“Oh!”

Ashley snapped out the monosyllable in a dry, metallic voice pitched higher than his usual key.  The English softening of the vowel sound, so droll to the American ear, was also more pronounced than was customary in his speech, so that the exclamation became a sharp “A-ow!”

Feeling his greeting to have been insufficient, Davenant continued, pumping up a forced rough-and-ready cordiality.  “Heard so much about you, Colonel, that you seem like an old friend.  Hope you’ll like us.  Hope you’ll enjoy your stay.”

“Oh, indeed?  I don’t know, I’m sure.”

Ashley’s glance shifted from Drusilla to Olivia as though asking in some alarm who was this exuberant bumpkin in his Sunday clothes who had dropped from nowhere.  Davenant drew back; his face fell.  He looked like a big, sensitive dog hurt by a rebuff.  It was Mrs. Fane who came to the rescue.

“Peter’s come to see Cousin Henry.  They’ve got business to talk over.  And mother wants to know if you and Colonel Ashley won’t come to dinner to-morrow evening.  That’s my errand.  Just ourselves, you know.  It’ll be very quiet.”

Olivia recovered somewhat from the agitation of the previous half-hour as well as from the movement of sudden, inexplicable anger which Ashley’s reception of Davenant had produced in her.  Even so she could speak but coldly, and, as it were, from a long way off.

“You’ll go,” she said, turning to Ashley, “and I’ll come if I can leave papa.  I’ll run up flow and see how he is and take Mr. Davenant with me.”

XIV

There was dignity in the way in which Davenant both withdrew and stood his ground.  He was near the Corinthian portico of the house as Olivia approached him.  Leaning on his stick, he looked loweringly back at Ashley, who talked to Drusilla without noticing him further.  Olivia guessed that in Davenant’s heart there was envy tinged with resentment, antipathy, not tempered by a certain unwilling admiration.  She wondered what it was that made the difference between the two men, that gave Ashley his very patent air of superiority.  It was a superiority not in looks, since Davenant was the taller and the handsomer; nor in clothes, since Davenant was the better dressed; nor in the moral make-up, since Davenant had given proofs of unlimited generosity.  But there it was, a tradition of self-assurance, a habit of command which in any company that knew nothing about either would have made the Englishman easily stand first.

Her flash of anger against the one in defense of the other passed away, its place being taken by a feeling that astonished her quite as much.  She tried to think it no more than a pang of jealousy at seeing her own countryman snubbed by a foreigner.  She was familiar with the sensation from her European, and especially her English, experiences.  At an unfriendly criticism it could be roused on behalf of a chance stranger from Colorado or California, and was generally quite impersonal.  She told herself that it was impersonal now, that she would have had the same impulse of protection, of championship, for any one.