At this moment the boy from below-stairs knocked with tea and cakes, little Italian cakes in iced jackets and paper boats.  “Yes, certainly—­yes, I will,” said Kendal, staring at the tray, and trying to remember when he had ordered it; “but it’s your plain duty to make us both some tea, and to eat as many of these pink-and-white things as you possibly can.  They seem to have come down from heaven for you.”

They ate and drank and talked and were merry for quite twenty minutes.  Elfrida opened her notebook and threatened absurdities of detail for publication in the Age; he defied her, tilted his chair back, put his feet on a packing-box, and smoked a cigarette.  He placed all the studies he had made after she left Paris before her, and as she finished the last but one of the Italian cakes, they discussed these in the few words from which they both drew such large and satisfying meanings as do not lie at all in the vocabulary of outsiders.  Elfrida felt the keenest pleasure of her whole life in the knowledge that Kendal was talking to her more seriously, more carefully, because of that piece of work in the Decade; the consciousness of it was like wine to her, freeing her thoughts and her lips.  Kendal felt, too, that the plane of their relations was somehow altered.  He was not sure that he liked the alteration.  Already she had grown less amusing, and the real camaraderie which she constantly suggested her desire for he could not, at the bottom of his heart, truly tolerate with a woman.  He was an artist, but he was also an Englishman, and he told himself that he must not let her get into the way of coming there.  He felt an obscure inward irritation, which he did not analyze, that she should talk so well and be so charming personally at the same time.

Elfrida, still in the flush of her elation, was putting on her gloves to go, when the room resounded to a masterful double rap.  The door almost simultaneously opened far enough to disclose a substantial gloved hand upon the outer handle, and in the tones of confident aggression which habit has given to many middle-aged ladies, a feminine voice said, “May we come in?”

It is not probable that Lady Halifax had ever been so silently, surely, and swiftly damned before.  In the fraction of an instant that followed Kendal glanced at the dismantled tray and felt that the situation was atrocious.  He had just time to put his foot upon his half-smoked cigarette, and to force a pretence of unconcern into his “Come in!  Come in!” when the lady and her daughter entered with something of unceremoniousness.

“Those are appalling stairs—­” Lady Halifax observed Elfrida, and came to an instant’s astonished halt—­“of yours, Mr. Kendal, appalling!” Then as Kendal shook hands with Miss Halifax she faced round upon him in a manner which said definitely, “Explain!” and behind her sharp good-natured little eyes Kendal read, “If it is possible!” He looked at Elfrida in the silent hope that she would go, but she appeared to have no such intention.  He was pushed to a momentary wish that she had got into the cupboard, which he dismissed, turning a deeper brick color as it came and went.  Elfrida was looking up with calm inquiry, buttoning a last glove-button.