“Have you spoken to your mother about this?” he said.
“My mother? no; why speak to her till I know my fate? A man does not like to speak much of such matters if there be a probability of his being rejected. I tell you because I do not like to make my way into your house under a false pretence.”
“But what would Lady Lufton say?”
“I think it probable that she would be displeased on the first hearing it; that in four-and-twenty hours she would be reconciled; and that after a week or so Lucy would be her dearest favourite and the prime minister of all her machinations. You don’t know my mother as well as I do. She would give her head off her shoulders to do me a pleasure.”
“And for that reason,” said Mark Robarts, “you ought, if possible, to do her pleasure.”
“I cannot absolutely marry a wife of her choosing, if you mean that,” said Lord Lufton.
They went on walking about the garden for an hour, but they hardly got any farther than the point to which we have now brought them. Mark Robarts could not make up his mind on the spur of the moment; nor, as he said more than once to Lord Lufton, could he be at all sure that Lucy would in any way be guided by him. It was, therefore, at last settled between them that Lord Lufton should come to the parsonage immediately after breakfast on the following morning. It was agreed also that the dinner had better not come off, and Robarts promised that he would, if possible, have determined by the morning as to what advice he would give his sister.
He went direct home to the parsonage from Framley Court, feeling that he was altogether in the dark till he should have consulted his wife. How would he feel if Lucy were to become Lady Lufton? and how would he look Lady Lufton in the face in telling her that such was to be his sister’s destiny? On returning home he immediately found his wife, and had not been closeted with her five minutes before he knew, at any rate, all that she knew.
“And you mean to say that she does love him?” said Mark.
“Indeed she does; and is it not natural that she should? When I saw them so much together I feared that she would. But I never thought that he would care for her.”