At the same moment Marion Page rose leisurely and strolled toward the billiard-room.
"Our walk ?" repeated Sylvia absently--"it's raining, you know." Yet only a day or two ago she had walked to church with Siward through the rain, the irritated Major feeling obliged to go with them.

Her eyes followed Siward's figure, suddenly dark against the door of the lighted billiard-room, then brilliantly illuminated, as he entered, nodded acceptance to Mortimer's invitation, and picked up the cue just laid aside by Agatha Caithness, who had turned to speak to Marion.

Then Mortimer's bulk loomed nearer; voices became gay and animated in the billiard-room.

Siward's handsome face was bent toward Agatha Caithness in gay challenge; Mortimer's heavy laugh broke out; there came the rattle of pool-balls, and the dull sound of cue-butts striking the floor; then, crack! and the game began, with Marion Page and Siward fighting Mortimer and Miss Caithness for something or other.
Quarrier had been speaking for some time before Sylvia became aware of it--something about a brisk walk in the morning somewhere; and she nodded impatiently, watching Marion's supple waist-line as she bent far over the illuminated table for a complicated shot at the enemy.
His fiancee's inattention was not agreeable to Quarrier.

A dozen things had happened since his arrival which had not been agreeable to him: her failure to meet him at the Fells Crossing, and the reason for her failure; and her informal acquaintance with Siward, whose presence at Shotover he had not looked for, and her sudden intimacy with the man he had never particularly liked, and whom within six months he had come to detest and to avoid.
These things--the outrageous liberty Siward had permitted himself in caricaturing him, the mortifying caprice of Sylvia for Siward on the day of the Shotover cup-drive--had left indelible impressions in a cold and rather heavy mind, slow to waste effort in the indulgence of any vital emotion.
In a few years indifference to Siward had changed to passive disapproval; that, again, to an emotionless dislike; and when the scandal at the Patroons Club occurred, for the first time in his life he understood what it was to fear the man he disliked.