‘I really thought I should have died of it on the spot. The bare idea of thinking I could endure such a being.’
‘Well,’ said Dolores, just as the clatter ceased at a little station. ‘You know you did walk up and down with him ever so long, and I am sure you liked him very much.’
An indignant ‘You don’t understand’ was absolutely cut off by an imperative grasp and hush from Miss Hacket the elder; Aunt Jane was suffocating with laughter, Lady Merrifield, between that and a certain shame for womanhood, which made her begin to talk at random about anything or everything else.
CHAPTER XXII. — NAY.
‘What a mull they have made of it!’ were Mr. Maurice Mohun’s first words when he found the compartment free for a tete-a-tete with his brother.
‘All’s well that ends well,’ was the brief reply.
‘Well, indeed! Mary would not have thought so.’ To which the colonel had nothing to say.
‘It serves me out,’ his brother went on presently. ‘I ought to have done something for that wretched fellow before I went, or, at any rate, have put Dolly on her guard; but I always shirked the very thought of him.’
‘Nothing would have kept him out of harm’s way.’