Read "The Mummy and Miss Nitocris" by George Griffith online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The time, about an hour or so before tea, was occupied by the guests according to their varying tastes -- in tennis, croquet, more or less good-natured gossip, and flirtations which may or may not have been serious.
Nitocris saw with growing cause for self-gratulation that Lord Leighton and Brenda were decidedly attracted towards each other. He, in spite of having received his gracious, but, as he well knew, final _conge_ from Nitocris, still felt that he was not quite playing the game with himself; but for all that it was impossible for him not to see that the emotion, which was even now stirring in his heart, awakened by the first touch of Brenda's hand, and the first meeting of their eyes, was something very different from the tenderly respectful admiration, the real friendship, inevitably exalted by the magic of sex, which, as he saw now, he had innocently mistaken for love.