“Mostly me, Julius. Because I have, as I told you, the least bit more effrontery. But her ladyship agrees, and the two old gossips sip their tea and mumble their toast, with all the harmony and happiness of superannuated sinners. I’m sure I needn’t explain that feeling to men—they knew all about it!”
“This picture, distant though it is, saps my conception of Lady Dundrannan,” I protested. “Perhaps of you too; do you mind if I call you a good hater?”
A smile hung about her lips; but her voice passed from the gay to the gentle, and the old inward-looking gaze took possession of her eyes. “No, I don’t mind, I like my hatreds; even for me there never failed to be something amusing in them. I wonder if I do myself too much credit in saying—something unreal? Did I play parts—like poor Arsenio? But still they seemed very real, and they kept my courage up. I suppose it’s funny to think that one behaves well—honorably—sometimes, just to spite somebody else. I’m afraid it is so, though—isn’t it, Sir Paget?”
“The Pharisee in the Temple comes somewhere near your notion.”
She came and sat herself down on the arm of my chair, and threw her arm round my neck. “Yes, hatreds serve their turn. But they ought to die; being of the earth earthy, they ought to, oughtn’t they? And they do. Do any of us here hate poor Arsenio now?” Suddenly she kissed me. “You never did, because you’re so ridiculously understanding—and I thank you for that now, because it helped me to try not to, to try to remember that he loved me, and that he couldn’t help being what he was. But where’s all my anger gone? Why, you and I often talk of him, and enjoy his tricks, don’t we? They can’t hurt us now; they’re just amusing, and we’re grateful to the poor man, and don’t feel hard to him any more, do we?” She fell silent for a moment, and then, with a broader smile, and with one hand uplifted in the air, she said, “And so, Sir Paget, very, very dear Sir Paget, I back myself to make friends with Nina in—well, say five years!”
The prudently calculated audacity of this undertaking made us laugh. “And with Waldo—how soon?” asked Sir Paget.
“Oh, to-morrow! But if I do that, I must take ten years, instead of five, for Nina!”
“You’d better arrange the time-table in your own way, my dear,” Sir Paget admitted discreetly. “Now I’ll go off to bed and leave you to have a talk together.”
He rose from his chair and advanced towards her, to give her his good-night greeting. Quicker than he was, she met him almost before he had taken a step. Catching his hands in hers, she fell on her knees before him. “Have you a blessing left for the sinner that repenteth—for your prodigal daughter?”
She was not in tears now, nor near them. She was just wonderfully and exultantly coaxing.