He swished at the nettles as he made his next contribution to our meagre conversation. “But Beatrice Gladwin will marry some day soon, I expect.”
“Well?”
I was saying little, but at this point Fullard went one better. He just cocked his eye at me, leaving me to read his meaning as I best could.
“In that case, of course, she’d be sent away,” said I, smiling.
“Kicked out?” He grumbled the question, half under his breath.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Everything would be done kindly, no doubt.”
“Not fair on the chap, either,” he remarked after some moments. I think that my mind supplied the unspoken part of his conversation quite successfully: he was picturing the household à trois; he himself was, in his mind’s eye, “the chap,” and under the circumstances he thought “the chap” ought not to be exposed to temptation. I agreed, but kept my agreement, and my understanding, to myself.
“What appalling bad luck that poor little girl’s had!”
“One of them had to have very bad luck,” I reminded him. “Sir Thomas contrived that.”
He started a little. He had forgotten the exceedingly bad luck which once had threatened Miss Gladwin, the girl he had come to woo. The captain’s state of feeling was, in fact, fairly transparent. I was sorry for him—well, for all of them—because he certainly could not afford to offer his hand to Nettie Tyler.