He shrugged his shoulders peevishly. Her spirits fell again.
"I see! Yes, if she—if she doesn't take it properly, he'll go away again, and I'm to be ready to stay here." Another change in the barometer came in a flash. "But she can't help being Lady Tristram now!"
"It's all a most unjustifiable proceeding. He tricks the girl——"
"Yes, he had to. That was the only chance. If he'd told her before——"
"But isn't she in love with him?"
"Oh, you don't know the Tristrams! Oh, what are we to do?" Save running through every kind and degree of emotion Mina seemed to find nothing to do.
"And I'm bound to say that I consider our position most embarrassing." Mr Neeld spoke with some warmth, with some excuse too perhaps. To welcome a newly married couple home may be thought always to require some tact; when it is a toss-up whether they will not part again for ever under your very eyes the situation is not improved. Such trials should not be inflicted on quiet old bachelors; Josiah Cholderton had not done with his editor yet.
"We must treat it as a mere trifle," the Imp an
nounced, fixing on the thing which above all others she could not achieve. Yet her manner was so confident that Neeld gasped. "And if that doesn't do, we must tell her that the happiness of her whole life depends on what she does to-night." Variety of treatment was evidently not to be lacking.
"I intend to take no responsibility of any kind. He's got himself into a scrape. Let him get out of it," persisted Neeld.