“No, no!” filled with instant compunction, and her blushes as she spoke were visible even by moonlight. “I think more of you than of any one, Mark.” Then, as if frightened at her own confession, she hastened to add, “Every one is going in, and here is my next partner coming to look for me.”
“Let him look!” was the unprincipled answer. “Shall we go down and sit on the seat in the tennis-ground, by the big verbena tree?”
“But I am engaged to Major Lawrence,” she objected, though she knew that resistance was useless.
“No doubt; but you are engaged to me—you and I are to be partners for life. Ah, ha!” with a triumphant laugh. “There, he has been waylaid by Mrs. Troutbeck—he won’t get away from her under an hour. They are all going back,” glancing at many other couples who were gravitating towards the club; “we shall have the place to ourselves. Come along,” and leading her down the steps, they passed among glimmering flower-beds, and faint sweet flowers, to a recently vacated rustic bench. “I dare say you have often wondered what kept me at Shirani?” he began. “I came, in the first instance, hoping to meet my father. He has been thirty years out here, he was in the Indian Cavalry, and settled in this country, which he loves. My uncle is my adopted father, and I have seen very little of my real father since I was a kid; he lives in mysterious retirement in these hills, about fifty miles away, and is a widower for the second time. I have been waiting on week after week, hoping that he would send for me—that was my chief motive for remaining at Shirani. It is no longer so—as you very well know—in fact, of late, you have driven him clean out of my head!”
“If he were my father, I would go and visit him, without waiting for an invitation,” said Honor, resolutely.
“I have written several times to say that I should like to see him, and asking when I might start—a plain enough hint, surely?”
“You are too punctilious. Why wait to be asked? There, that waltz is over; what a short one it was. Now I must really go in.”
“What a thing it is to have a conscience! A strong sense of duty to one’s partners!” he exclaimed with a laugh. “However, I am one of them myself, and I will let you off easily.”
“No, thank you,” she answered, with uncompromising rectitude. “Pray what about your own partners? And you are one of the hosts, too!”
“I see that I may always look to you now to remind me of my duty,” he said, rising with extreme reluctance. “And I never felt more inclined to shirk it than now.”