"If you don't tell me at once, I shall scream."
"I hardly know how. I—oh, good lord!—I—I've fallen in love with someone else."
I must now make a confession as shameful as his. My mind jumped to the conclusion that Terry Burns was referring to me. I expected him to explain that, on seeing his ideal after these many years, he found that after all it was his faithful Pal he loved! I was conceited enough to think this quite natural, though regrettable, and my first impulse was to spare us both the pain of such an avowal.
"Good gracious!" I warded him off. "So hearts can really be caught in the rebound? But what I most want to know is, why have you unloved Princess Avalesco?"
"It's most horribly disloyal and beastly of me. If you must know, it's because she's lost her beauty, and has got fat. I wouldn't have believed that a few years could make such a difference. And she can't be thirty-five! But she's a mountain. And her hair looks jolly queer. I think it must have come out with some illness, and she's got on her head one of those things you call a combination."
"We don't! We call it a transformation," I corrected him in haste. "Oh, this is awful! Think of the fortune you've spent to offer Dun Moat to your lady-love for a few weeks, only to discover that she isn't your lady-love! What a waste! I suppose now you'll go up to London——"
"No," said Terry, "I shall stay here. And—I can't feel that the money's wasted in taking Dun Moat. Just seeing such a face as I've seen is worth every sovereign."
"Face?" I echoed.
"Yes. I told you I'd fallen in love. You must have guessed it was with someone at Dun Moat, as I've been nowhere else."
I hadn't guessed that. But I wasn't going to let him know that my guesses had come home to roost! "It can't be Mrs. Dobell," I said, "because you've seen her before, and she's old. Has the Princess got a beautiful Cinderella for a maid, and——"