“You mean——?”
“I mean my sanctimonious brother and his prudish lady!”
“Surely——?” He raised his eyebrows in expressive query.
“Not she!” cried Lady Lochore in passionate disgust. “I would think the better of her if she did. No, she’s none of those who deem the world well lost for love. Oh, she’ll calculate! She’ll give nothing for nothing! She’s laid her plans.” Lady Lochore began reckoning on three angry fingers uplifted. “There’s the equivocal position—one; my brother’s diseased notions of honour—two; her own bread-and-butter comeliness—three. She’ll hook him, Tony. She’ll hook him, and my boy will go a beggar! Lochore has pretty well ruined us as it is.”
“I should not regard Sir David as a marrying man, myself,” said the colonel soothingly.
“No,” said she, “the last man in the world to marry, but the first to be married on some preposterous claim! Look here, Tony, we are old friends. I have not walked you off here to waste your time. You know that my fortunes are in even more rapid decline than myself. There’s the child; he is the heir to this place. Before God, what is it to me, but the child and his rights! I’ll fight for them till I die. Not much of a boast, you say, but when a woman’s pushed to it, as I am”—her voice failed her. There was something awful in the contrast between the energy of her passion and the frailness of her body and in the way they reacted one upon another.
“Poor soul!” said Colonel Harcourt to himself—and his kind eyes were almost suffused.
“Tony, Tony!” she panted in a whisper of frantic intensity, “you can help. Oh, don’t look like that! I know I’m boring you, but I’ll not bore anyone for long. Think what it means to me! Fool! As if any man could understand! Don’t be afraid, I won’t ask anything hard of you. Only to make love to the rosy dairymaid, to the prim housekeeper, to the pretty widow. Why, man, you can’t keep your wicked eyes off her as it is!”
He leaned back against the bench, crossed one shapely leg over the other, closed his eyes and laughed gently to himself. Lady Lochore, bending forward, measured him with a swift glance, and her lips parted in a sneer.
“You’re but a lazy fellow. You like your peach growing at your elbow. You’ve been afraid of hurting my feelings ... you have been so long regarded as my possession! Oh, Tony, that’s all over now. Listen—if you don’t know the ways of woman, who does? The case is very plain: that creature is planning to compromise David. I know how you can make love when you choose, and I know my fool of a brother. I’ll have her compromised first! And then——”