She turned to him, now clasping his arms with her hands. “You! Yet I put you to shame; I betrayed you; I was false—Oh, and cruel to Waldo!” For the first time in all my knowledge of her I saw tears running down her cheeks. Sir Paget took her hands into his and kissed her upturned face.
“Waldo’s as happy as a king—or, at least, a Prince Consort,” he said, smiling, though I think that his voice shook a little. “And, since it’s an evening of penitence and confession, I’ll make my confession too. I’ve always been a bit of a traitor, or a rebel, myself. You know it well enough, Julius!” He smiled. “Sitting here, under the sway of Briarmount, I’m afraid that I have, before now, drunk a silent toast to the Queen over the Water. Because I remembered you in old days, my dear.”
The mention of Briarmount brought the smiles back to Lucinda’s face. She rose from her stool and stood on the hearthrug between us, looking from one to the other. She gave a defiant toss of her fair head. “Guilty, my lords! I can’t abide her. And I’m glad—yes, I am—that she’s not here at Cragsfoot!”
“Moreover, she has retreated even from Briarmount before you,” chuckled Sir Paget.
“When I advanced in strength, she always retreated,” said Lucinda with another toss. “The fact is—I had the least bit more effrontery. I could bluff her, whatever was in my heart. She couldn’t bluff me.”
“Reconciliation, I suppose, impossible?” hazarded the diplomatist en ratraite, not able to resist the temptation of plying his trade, of getting round the grand implacability; what a feather in his cap it would be!
“Looking down the vista of years,” said Lucinda, now gayly triumphant in her mastery over the pair of us, “a thing I used to do, Julius, oftener than I need now—I see two old ladies, basking somewhere in the sun—perchance at Villa San Carlo—which I have not, up to now, visited, though I know the surrounding district. From under their wigs, in old squeaky voices——”
“I thank God for my mortality,” murmured old Sir Paget as he looked at her.
“They’re telling one another that they must both of them have been very wonderful, clever, attractive, beautiful! Or else they’d never have made so much trouble, and never squabbled so much. And I shouldn’t wonder if they said—both of them—that nothing in the whole business was their fault at all; it was only the men who were so silly. But then they made the men silly. What men wouldn’t they make silly, when they were young and beautiful so long ago?”
“How much of this is Lady Dundrannan—and how much more is you?”