'People always can.'
'Were you ever tried?' asked Alice, slyly, for all the simplicity.
'I hope never to be, if deceiving my friends and making others deceive is to be the consequence.'
'Well, luckily there isn't much chance,' crept out of the demure lips. It was intended as the thorn beneath the may-flower, but it was no such thing. Wilmet was quite ready to accept the improbability as very fortunate.
'That has nothing to do with it,' she said. 'The question is, what it is right to do now. It seems hard for me to say so, being your friend and his sister—'
'Oh, never mind that. People's sisters never do like the girls they are fond of.'
Decidedly Wilmet could not get on. Her mouth was stopped either by a little rapture about Edgar, or a little velvet-pawed scratch to herself, whenever she tried in earnest to set the matter before Alice; and when, being a determined person, she at last talked on through all that Alice tried to thrust in, and delivered her mind of the remonstrance she had carefully thought over, and balanced between kindness, prudence, and duty, and all the time with the conviction that not one word was heeded! If it was not English malice it was French malice that pointed the replies and sent Wilmet away as much provoked as pitying, and not at all inclined to be examined by Edgar on her interview, and let him gather that she had not had the best of it. Poor Alice! what were these little triumphs of a sharp tongue in comparison with the harm she did herself by exacerbating whoever tried to argue with her? There was one person she did profess to wish to see, namely, Geraldine; but the flying rheumatic pains, excited by the black east wind with sleet upon its blast, could not be trifled with; and Major Knevett's wrath put an effectual stop to Alice's entering the house during the Saturday and Sunday of his stay at Bexley. Perhaps Cherry was not sorry. She could not have pleaded against Edgar, in spite of her disapprobation of both; and moreover, the thought at the bottom of her heart was, 'How could any one who had been the object of such tones of the one brother's voice be won by the showy graces of the other? Edgar could easily have thrown off a disappointment; but Felix came first—and oh! can he shake it off in the same light way?'
She had not the comfort of talking it over. Felix made no sign, and Edgar's line was to treat the whole complication as a matter of pleasantry, pretending that he had only gone into it to please Felix! and yet, as came to their knowledge, privately exchanging billets and catch-words with Alice, while he openly declared his engagement and resolution to work his way up and lay his laurels at her feet.
He went away the very same morning as Major Knevett carried off his daughter to Jersey, audaciously following them to the station, where he exchanged a grasp of the hand with her in the very sight of the 'grey tyrant father,' who actually gnashed his teeth, in his inability either to knock him down or give him in charge.
There was no time to breathe between the departure of this pair of lovers and the arrival of Alda's splendid Life-Guardsman, who, horses and all, took up his abode at the Fortinbras Arms, and spent his days in felicity with Alda. A very demonstrative pair they were. To Geraldine, often unwillingly en tiers, they seemed to spend their time chiefly in sitting hand in hand, playing with one another's rings and dangles, of which each seemed to possess an inexhaustible variety. Ferdinand's dressing-case and its contents were exquisite in their way, and were something between an amusement and a horror to Wilmet, who could not understand Felix's regard for so extravagant and wasteful a person, who gave away sovereigns where half-crowns would have been more wholesome, half-crowns instead of shillings, shillings instead of pence, and who moreover was devoted to horse-flesh. His own favourite steed, Brown Murad, had been secured at a fabulous price; and the possession of him seemed to be the crowning triumph over a certain millionaire baronet in the same corps, evidently his rival. What was even more alarming was that every detail about races and horses in training was at his fingers' ends, so that he put Felix up to a good deal of knowledge useful to the racing articles in the Pursuivant; but he declared that he never betted. His was a perilous position, homeless and friendless as he stood; and this rendered him doubly grateful for the brotherly welcome he received. Yet the days would have been long to any but lovers, in spite of the rides and walks, one even to Minsterham to see Lance. Ferdinand liked to recur to the old remembrances of his convalescence; but in these Alda had no part, and they seemed to jar on her. She might sometimes seem half fretted by his impetuous southern love, but she could not bear a particle of his attention to be bestowed on aught save herself; and when Geraldine would have utilised his fine straight profile as an artistic study, the monopoly was so unpleasing that the portrait had to be dropped. The odd thing was that Alda should have a lover whose most congenial spirit was Clement. He was a great frequenter of St. Matthew's, and had no interest save in kindred subjects. Felix always found them alike difficult to converse with, from a want of any breadth of sympathy with subjects past or present, such as would have occupied him even without the exigencies of his profession. They seemed to talk, not church, but shop, as if they did not look beyond proximate ecclesiastical details, which they discussed in technical terms startling to the uninitiated; and yet Felix trusted that Clement's soul was a good deal deeper and wider than his tongue, and that Ferdinand's, if narrow, was thoroughly resolute, finding in his enthusiasm for these details a counterpoise for the temptations of his position.