"Look here, Al, Mary seems to have given him a bit of her mind; but I must be civil. We can't tell the chap that he's—well, you know. It wouldn't do out here. You don't mind seeing him, do you?"
Alicia said that she would do her duty.
"And shall I be safe in writing and telling him I can say nothing till he has discovered your inclinations?"
"You'll be perfectly safe," said Alicia with decision.
The Governor wrote his letter; it was a very civil letter indeed, and Lord Eynesford felt that it ought in some degree to assuage the wrath which his wife's unseemly surprise had probably raised in Coxon's breast.
"It's all very well," he pondered, "for a man to be civil all round as I am; but his womankind can always give him away."
He closed his note, pushed the writing-pad from him, and, leaning back in his chair, puffed at his cigar. In the moment of reflection, the impression of Alicia's unexplained agitation revived in his memory.
"I don't believe," he mused, "that she expected me to say Coxon. I wonder if there's some one else; it looked like it. But who the deuce could it be here? It can't be Heseltine or Flemyng—they're not her sort—and there's no one else. Ah! the mail came in this morning, perhaps it's some one at home. That must be it. I like that fellow's impudence. Wonder who the other chap is. Perhaps I was wrong—you can't tell with women, they always manage to get excited about something. I swear there was nothing before I came out, and there's no one here, and——"
"Mr. Kilshaw," announced Jackson.