“Certainly,” he answered, coolly. “That is the reason why I have come into this room. It was not my aunt whom I wanted to see. You know, we are barely on speaking terms.”
“You needn’t tell me that. I assure you my mother has taken good care to let me know her opinion of you. I warn you plainly that if she comes in and finds you here, I shall abandon you to her.”
Captain Mauleverer tried to look unconcerned.
“I didn’t think you were such a coward as that, Vick,” he remonstrated. “But, after all, I don’t see that I have done anything so very dreadful. She can’t forbid me the house altogether, you know. I’m her own husband’s nephew.”
Lady Victoria smiled with good-natured scorn.
“That’s nothing. You don’t know my mother. She wouldn’t hesitate to forbid her husband the house, if she wanted to. Husbands occupy a very uncertain position in society nowadays; they are only tolerated.”
“Is that a warning for me, I wonder?”
Something in her cousin’s tone, and the look with which he accompanied the question, brought out an impatient frown on Victoria’s face. She walked over to the window, and stood tapping her foot against the floor.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Gerald! You know as well as I do that it is not the slightest use for this sort of thing to go on.”
She kept her back turned on him while she spoke. There was a touch of softness in his voice as he answered: