The baronet, it must be said, showed some embarrassment over the contretemps. “I ain’t responsible for this Dunlone business, you know,” his pained eyebrows pleaded to Tuke. “I don’t profess to understand Angel, and she’s as wilful as the deuce, she is.”
He would nevertheless have had his friend stay to dinner; but this Tuke would not consent to, pleading his riding-dress and boots for excuse, and protesting that he must go after he had drunk the dish of tea Miss Royston had promised him.
All the time he was there the lady made much of her visitor, while my lord sat by on a sofa, with his mouth like a slur-mark in music, sulkily employing himself in ripping the gold thread from a sword-knot. For this exquisite had brought his “drizzling” box with him—a beautiful tortoise-shell casket, with the Dunlone stork in silver on the lid, and within a neat array of hilt-bands, shoulder-straps, and galloons of tarnished lace—and would sit by the hour together, silent as a Trappist, while he unravelled his yarn and wound it upon wooden reels. Out of the sale of these, he would tell you, he made quite a little monthly income, for there was no outlay, the material being cajoled from easy friends or accepted from parasites; and without doubt the occupation and its moral fitted him like a glove.
He did not even look up when the other came to bid him good-evening, but Tuke thought he heard him murmur, “Oh, curse it!” under his breath, and was fain to accept this benediction as a negative testimony to the value put upon him as a rival, and to the capriciousness of the soft sex in general.
The short winter afternoon was closing in as our gentleman, profoundly cogitating on the policy it should be best to pursue with a ravissante who would thus humble or exalt him according to the whimsies of her mood, came down to his own gate in the hollow where the ruined lodge was situated. Here much had been redressed and improved, so that—though the building itself remained an enbowered wreck—the entrance and the drive presented an ordered appearance, and, indeed, to any lover of the picturesque, an aspect quite alluring in its sweet and lofty loneliness.
He had entered and clanked-to the gate behind him, when something glimmering to the back of a tree-trunk brought him to a pause, and immediately he advanced upon it, and, skirting the bole, jerked to a stop and cried, “Betty!”
She stood before him, her head hanging and her face gone a little white; and she knitted her fingers together and had not, it seemed, a word to say.
“Why, what are you doing here, in the dusk and the snow?” he said, in something of a stern voice. “I understood you had gone back with your grandfather?”
Her forehead, under its hood, took a line of pain, and her lips trembled. He thought he foresaw the coming shower, and his reluctance to encourage it made him assume a little harshness.
“Where is your grandfather?” he said coldly and brusquely.