“Of course not,” he assented. “Well, we don’t get on together. He is—not to put too fine a point on it—about as disagreeable a person as you’d find in two days’ walk! We never have got on together. They say that a man always hates the fellow who is to come after him, unless it happens to be his own son; and I suppose that’s the reason the marquis hates me——”
“Because you are to be the next marquis?” she said.
He nodded coolly, and tilted his hat so that it screened his eyes from the sun, and permitted him to feast upon her beautiful face more completely.
“Yes, that is about it; but I’ll give the marquis the credit of hating everybody all round, himself into the bargain, I dare say; but I fancy he reserves a special line of detestation for his own relatives. Ah, you are smiling,” he broke off, with the short laugh that sounded so good and frank. “You are wondering what this has to do with my disliking you to send the handkerchief!”
Doris smiled again in assent.
“Well, you see, I thought it might come into the marquis’s possession, or that he’d hear of it through Lady Grace——”
She turned her eyes upon his, not curiously, but with graceful questioning.
“That’s a lady—Lord Peyton’s daughter—who is stopping there,” he explained, “and they might ask questions, and—and bother me about it!”
“Well?” she said, quietly.
He looked down half hesitatingly, then met her eyes, which seemed in their fixed regard to reach to his soul.