She pressed her hands to her heart, then to her throat; for a moment or two the poor body had struck work. Only her eyes pleaded, threatened.
“And then? Before the Lord, you ladies!”
For all his bonhommie de viveur, Colonel Harcourt, of the First Guards, was known about Town to be a good deal of “a tiger,” as the cant of the day had it; and he held a justified reputation as an expert with the “saw-handle and hair-trigger.” Conscious of this, he went on:
“Truly, Maud, it may well be said there’s never a man sent below but a woman showed the way! But is there not something a little crude in your plan?”
“Crude! Have I time to be mealy-mouthed? I’m not asking you anything very hard, God knows! Merely to follow your own bent, Tony Harcourt; you have had your way with me, but that is over now, and you know it. I want you to devote yourself to that piece of country bloom instead. In three months you know what I shall be!...”
“My dear Maud.... And then?” He was amused no longer: Lady Lochore was undeniably crude. “A regular conspiracy!” he went on. But, after a moment’s musing, a gleam came into his eye. “What of it!” he cried, “all’s fair in love and war—a soldier’s motto, and it has been mine! And as for you, why, your spirits would keep twenty alive!”
She laughed scornfully.
“It sounds better to say so, anyhow,” she retorted. “I don’t want any mewing over me. So it’s a bargain, Tony? For old sake’s sake you’ll go against all your principles and make love to a pretty woman? And we’ll have this new Pamela out of the citadel. We’ll have this scheming dairy-wench shown up in her true colours! My precious brother, as you know, or you don’t know, has got some rather freakish notions about women. He’s had a slap in the face once already, and it turned him silly. Disgust him of this second love affair, he’ll never have a third and I shall die in peace. You have marked the affectionate, fraternal way in which he treats me! I had to force my way back into this house. He’ll never forgive me for marrying Lochore—and as for Lochore himself, to the trump of doom David will never forgive him for.... Bah! for doing him the best turn one man ever did another!”
“And what was that?” asked the colonel, with a slight yawn.
“What you and I are going to do now,” said my Lady. She smoothed her ruffled hair, folded her stained kerchief and slipped it into her bag; rose, and looked down smiling once more at the man, her fine nostrils fluttering with her quick breath in a way that gave a singular expression of mocking cruelty to her face. “Lochore saved Sir David from marrying beneath him.”