It crossed Joan's mind that if he were to be always in the way, and Bobby out of it, the proposal would be more attractive than it was at present. But so many thoughts crossed her mind while he was speaking, and she could not give expression to any one of them.
He looked at her with kind eyes. "You do like him, little Joan, don't you?" he asked.
"Yes," she said, "but—oh, not in that way." Again her muff went to her face.
A shade of disappointment crossed his. "Then I mustn't press you," he said. "But you are very young, my dear. Perhaps some day——! And I shall be a very pleased old man if I can one day have you for a daughter. There would be a house ready for you, and all—a charming house—you saw it—the Lodge, you know. I lived there when I was first married. I should like to see you there. I'd do it up for you from top to toe, exactly as you liked it. And I'd give you a motorcar of your own to get about in and pay your visits; and there are good stables if you want to ride. I hope you would live there a good part of the year, and there would be plenty of room for your friends and relations. You would come to us, I hope, in London. Your own rooms would be kept for you in my house, and you could have them as you wanted them. There would be Scotland in the Autumn. You've never seen Glenmuick. We're out all day there, and I don't know that it isn't even better than going abroad. Bobby doesn't care about fishing, but I think you would. We'd leave him to his stalking, and go off and spend long days on the loch and by the river. You'd never get tired of that. Then there's the yacht. You'd get lots of fun out of the yacht, if you like that sort of thing. We generally go to Cowes, and have a little cruise afterwards, just to blow away the cobwebs we get from amusing ourselves too hard in London. You'd get lots of change, and your pretty house as a background to it all, where you'd be queen of your own kingdom, my little Joan. There now, it looks as if I were trying to tempt you, with all sorts of things that wouldn't really matter, unless you—— Well, of course, they do matter. Love in a cottage is all very well, but I think young people are likely to get on better together if they've both got something to do. And you'd have plenty to do. I don't think you would ever feel dull."
If Mrs. Clinton had heard this speech she might not have felt so confident of its failing of its purpose as she did when Bobby Trench disclosed his views on life at its most attractive. It amounted to the same exaltation of "a good time," but it sounded different from Lord Sedbergh's lips—fresher, opening up vistas, to a country-bred girl, who had only just sipped at the delights of change, and was in the first flush of adventurous youth. The inherent tendency of such a life as he had set forth to lose its salience, to satisfy no more than the stay-at-home life, which Joan was beginning to find so dull, could hardly be known to her at her age. It held of itself glamorous possibilities, of which not the least was the astonishing change viewed in herself. The girl who was liable to be told at any moment that if she did not behave herself she should be sent to bed, by her father, was the same girl that her father's friend thought of as the honoured mistress of a household, one on whom gifts were to be showered, whose society was to be courted, whose every wish was to be considered.
If only Bobby Trench were not included in the bright picture! And yet she liked him now, and his society was never irksome.
"You are awfully kind to me," she fluttered. "But——"
"Oh, I know, my dear," he soothed her. "You couldn't possibly give me any answer that I should like to have now. Only, I hope—— Well, I do want you for Bobby, my little Joan. And he's very fond of you, you know. It has made a different man of him—er—wanting you as he does. That's the effect that the right sort of girl ought to have on a man. Bobby will make a good husband, if he does get the right sort of girl; I'm quite sure of that. She would be able to do anything with him that she liked; make anything of him."
This was flattery of a searching kind, and it did seem to Joan that she would be able to do anything she liked with Bobby Trench. As for Bobby Trench's father, she would have liked to go home and tell Nancy that he was the sweetest old lamb in the world. He had healed to some extent the wound caused by her sad discovery that nobody wanted her, caused in its turn—although she did not know it—by the discovery that John Spence didn't want her. The fact that Bobby Trench wanted her didn't count; that Lord Sedbergh wanted her, did. Wonderful things were happening to her as well as to Nancy, and if Nancy had a secret to hug, so had she.
But her secret did not support her long; she was made of stuff too tender. A few hours after her exaltation at the hands of Lord Sedbergh she was shedding lonely tears because Nancy had been so unkind to her, having coldly repulsed an effort to draw out of her some admission as to how she stood with regard to her own now plainly confessed lover.