She wrote her note, fastened and directed it, dwelling rather deliberately on the process as she neared its completion. She seemed as if she were turning over in her mind something to say, but finally rose, and said, "Well, I suppose she'll get that when she comes in. I'll take myself and the dogs back to Mountfield now."
"Why don't you wait and see her?" asked Dick, rather grudgingly, for he didn't want Mrs. Graham to stay. "She can't be long now."
Mrs. Graham looked at him shrewdly. "I don't think I will," she said. "She'll be out with the hounds to-morrow, I suppose. Look here, Dick, I don't know whether I'm a fool to say anything or not, and I don't want to mix myself up in other people's business, but Anne Conyers told me that Lady George was a friend of yours, and that you had got her this house. We'll see that she gets on here all right."
She gave him a knowing nod which made him reply—
"Oh, you mean that there's likely to be trouble at Kencote. Well, I don't mind telling you that there is trouble. My father announced to-day before Tom and Grace and the whole family that Lady George Dubec might be good enough for me to know in London, but she wasn't good enough for him or anybody to know at Kencote." He spoke bitterly, and as Mrs. Graham, who knew him well, had never heard him speak of his father.
"Did he?" she said. "Well, that's what, if I were a man, I should call rather thick. Still, he'll probably come round, and if he doesn't he is not the only person in South Meadshire, though he sometimes behaves as if he thought he was. Good-bye, Dick; to-morrow at eight o'clock, then. I'll write to Humphrey, though I shan't break my heart if he doesn't come."
Dick let her out at the front door, where she was vociferously greeted by her pack, and then returned to the drawing-room. "And I wonder what she'll be thinking as she goes home," he said to himself.
Virginia came into the room alone when she and Miss Dexter returned. Dick could hear her glad little cry of surprise outside when she was told he was there, and it made him catch his breath with a queer mixture of sensations. She brought a cool fresh fragrance into the room with her, and he thought he had never seen her look sweeter, with her rather frail beauty warmed into sparkling life by the exercise she had taken in the sharp winter air and her pleasure at finding him there on her return.
Sitting by her side on the sofa he told her what had happened, and she took the news thoughtfully and sadly. "He must be rather terrible, your father," she said, "and cleverer than you thought too, Dick, if he suspects already what is between us."
"Oh, I suppose it's I who am not so clever as I thought myself," he said. "When he asked me point-blank I couldn't tell him a lie. But I own I never thought he would ask me. It was from something I had said to him the night before, about not wanting to marry a youngster. I don't know why on earth I was fool enough to say it, and put him on the scent. I suppose I was thinking such a lot of you, my girl. I can't get you out of my head, you know. But the fact is I'm not cut out for a conspirator, Virginia, and now that all my carefully laid plans have come to nothing, I'm not sure that I'm not rather relieved."