"He is young, and love has made him modest," Mrs. Senter excused her favourite. "He knows he isn't a grand parti. But if they care for each other?"
"I have seen no reason to believe that she cares for him," said I, thinking myself (more or less) safe in the recollection of Ellaline's words at Winchester. I told you about them, I think.
"Ah, well," said Mrs. Senter, "she cares enough, anyhow, to have entered into a pact of some sort with the poor boy—a kind of understanding that, if you approve, she may at least think of being engaged to him in the future."
"You are sure she has done that?" I asked, staggered by this statement, which I was far from expecting.
"Quite sure, unless love (in the form of Dick) is deaf as well as blind. He certainly flatters himself that they are on these terms."
"Since when?" I persisted. (By the by, I wonder if the inquisitors ever hit on the ingenious plan of making prisoners torture themselves? Nothing hurts worse than self-torture.)
"Only since Lulworth Cove, or you would have heard of it before. You know when we came back from our walk, and saw them sitting on the beach together, I said what a pretty picture they made?"
Naturally, I remembered extremely well.
"That was when they had their great scene. Dick begged me, as an old friend of yours, to say a word when I found the chance. And I confess, I've made the chance to-night. I do hope you won't think me impertinent and interfering? I'm fond of Dick. He's about all I have to be fond of in the world. And besides—just because I've never been happy myself, I want others to be, while they're young, not to waste time."
I muttered something, I hardly know what, and she went on to talk to me of her past, for the first time. Said she had married when little more than a child, and had made the mistake of marrying a man she thought she could manage to live happily with, instead of one she couldn't manage to live happily without. That was all; but it had made all the difference—and if Miss Lethbridge had given her first love to Dick——