“Well, then, don’t pay; compromise, contest, make difficulties. You legal people needn’t be told how to raise obstacles. At all events, do anything rather than have an Irish property.”
“I wish I had one.”
“Well, I wish you had—that is, if you are so bent upon it. But I must go and tell my sister this distressing news. I don’t know how she’ll bear it! By the way,” added she, as she reached the door, “I shall find you here when I come back—you are not going away?”
“Certainly not without seeing Lady Vyner, if she will accord me that honour,” said he, stiffly.
“Of course she’ll see you,” cried she, and left the room.
Left alone with his reflections, Mr. M’Kinlay had not the pleasantest company. Had he mistaken all the relations between Miss Courtenay and himself, or was she changed to him—totally changed? Was it thus that they met last? He knew that she always had a certain flippant manner, and that she was eminently what the French call inconséquent; but she was more, far more, now. The allusion to Rickards’s age was a direct impertinence, and the question as to his yachting tastes was a palpable sneer at the habits of his daily life.
“The case does not look well—certainly not well,” murmured he, as he walked the room with his hands behind his back. “Many would throw up the brief, and say, ‘Take a nonsuit.’ Yes, most men would; but I’ll do nothing rashly!” And with this wise resolve he took up a book and began to read; but still the hours rolled on, and no one came. By the clock over the mantelpiece it was now four. Could it possibly be that it was two hours and a half since—since she had left him?
CHAPTER VIII. AN OLD BACHELOR’S HOUSE
It is quite true Georgina forgot all about Mr. M’Kinlay. The gardener had met her on her way, and presented her with a bouquet of Japanese roses—the real purple roses it was supposed never could be reared out of a Tycoon’s garden; and so she hastened up to her sister’s room, as totally oblivious of the man of law as though he had been hundreds of miles away. They talked pleasantly of flowers—flowers for the china vase, and flowers for the hair—they laughed at the incongruous blunders of the people who wore “wrong colours,” and that “drab bonnet” they had seen last Sunday in church. They next discussed dress, and the impossibility of wearing anything “decent” on the dusty roads; and, lastly, they ordered the ponies and the phaeton, and drove out.