“Oh, he isn’t half a bad fellow, and we’re excellent friends.”
“That’s very good of you. Now I have such a bad disposition that if I were in your place I should be half mad with jealousy.”
Cheriton laughed incredulously.
“I daresay you would stroke us all down the right way. Rupert says he feels as if he were lighting his cigar in a powder-magazine. But they get on very well, and Grace and Mary Cheriton think him perfectly charming.”
“I think I shall come to the ball in a mantilla. But have you done anything for poor Virginia?”
“Oh, yes; the old parson only wanted a little explanation,” said Cherry, quite carelessly enough to encourage Ruth in adding earnestly,—
“It is so good of her to want to help these poor people. Queenie is like a girl in a book. I really think she likes disagreeable duties.”
“I am sure you, who can sympathise with Virginia and yet know all the troubles, will be able to make it smooth for her. I wish you would.”
“Ah, but I am not nearly so good as Virginia,” said Ruth—a perfectly true statement, which she herself believed. Whether she expected Cheriton to believe it was a different matter.
Alvar had no excuse now for finding Oakby dull; the house was full of people, Lady Cheriton and her daughters were enchanted with his music, and he brightened up considerably and was off Cheriton’s mind, so that nothing spoilt the radiance of enjoyment that transfigured all the commonplace gaiety into a fairy dream. The younger ones found the times less good. Jack was shy and bored by fine people, Bob hated his dress clothes, Nettie was teased by Rupert, who varied between treating her as a Tomboy and flattering her as an incipient beauty, and thought her grandmother’s restrictions to white muslin and blue ribbons hard. But Mrs Lester had no notion of letting her forestall her career as a county beauty.