"Well, we needn't go all over it again," he said. "I haven't made up my mind yet. I don't say your mother shan't call and I don't say she shall. I must think it over. Of course it's a bit awkward for you."
"It's more than a bit awkward for me," said Dick uncompromisingly. "When you do think it over you might consider how particularly awkward it is, after having helped this lady to a house here, to have to tell her that my people don't consider her respectable enough to know."
"H'm! Ha!" grunted the Squire, at a loss how to meet this. Then he made a clutch at his authority. "Well, I think you ought to have asked me first, Dick," he said, "and not taken things for granted. If I'm putting you in an awkward position now, it's because you have put me in an awkward position first."
There was reason in this, perhaps more than the Squire usually displayed in discussing a subject in which his feelings were already engaged, and Dick did not want to go over the ground again until matters had advanced themselves a stage.
"She will be at the meet on Monday—driving," he said. "You will see what she is like, and that she isn't in the least like what you probably think she is. I should like to introduce you to her, but that shall be as you please."
The Squire did not reply to this. He sat looking at the fire with a puzzled frown on his face. Then he turned to his son and said, "There's nothing between you and this lady, Dick, is there? You hadn't got her in your mind last night when you said that you did not want to marry a young girl?"
Dick cursed himself inwardly for having made that unlucky speech. He was not cut out for however mild a conspiracy, and he hated to have to fence and parry. But he must answer quickly if suspicion, which would be disastrous at the present stage, were not to rest on him. He gave a little laugh. "Is that what you have been thinking of?" he asked. "Is that why you don't want mother to call on Lady George?"
The Squire had only to push his question, and he would have learnt everything, for Dick would not have denied Virginia. But he did not do so. "No, of course not," he said. "But if it were so—if that's how the land lay——"
Dick did not tell him that that was not how the land lay. He said nothing, and the Squire relinquished the subject, not to open it up again until he was alone with his wife that night. Then his disquietude came out, for Dick's reply to his question had not satisfied him, and putting two and two together, as he said, and impelled towards dreadful conclusions by his habit of making the most of vague fears, he had now fully convinced himself that the land did indeed lie in the direction of Lady George Dubec, now settled within a mile or two, at Blaythorn, and that, unless he could do something to stop it, a most dreadful catastrophe was about to overtake the house of Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton could do little to calm his fears. Privately she thought that he was making a mountain out of a mole-hill, and that Dick was as little likely as the Squire himself to marry such a woman as she imagined Lady George Dubec to be. For she knew how much alike her husband and her son were in all the essential aims and ambitions of their lives, although she knew also that Dick had a far cooler head and a better brain than his father's. For that very reason he was the less likely to make a marriage which would be beneath the dignity of his family. She said what she could to persuade her husband that Dick might be trusted in a matter of this sort, but he was in that stage of alarm when however much a man may desire to find himself mistaken he resists all attempts to prove him so. "I tell you, Nina," he said, "that he told me himself that when he did marry it would be a middle-aged woman, or words to that effect. And he gets this woman down here without saying a word to us about it, and they say she's good-looking—you heard Humphrey say that yourself, and Mrs. Graham too—and he goes over there this afternoon without mentioning it.—By Jove! didn't he say he wanted to go and see Jim at Mountfield? Yes, he did,—you remember—at luncheon. Nina, I'm afraid there's no doubt about it. Can't you see what a dreadful thing it would be, and that we must stop it at any cost?"