“I will do my best,” said Lydia, “but absolute proof is difficult to get, you know. One may be perfectly certain, and yet not have that.”
“I know,” Percy answered. “But anything that would give me a hold over that woman—” He broke off in his speech, but the intensity of his tone boded little good to Fanny Meredith should that hold over her be obtained. “One thing, at least, is certain,” he resumed after a moment—“the man explicitly denied to you that he had ever been Aimée’s lover.”
“Explicitly and emphatically.”
“Then that point is number one secured. This is a good beginning. Continue the work, Lydia, and let us see how long Mr. Kyrle will allow himself to be monopolized.”
VII.
Mr. Kyrle allowed himself to be monopolized almost unresistingly for several days. Not indeed as completely as at the Lido, but to a degree sufficient to prevent any satisfactory intercourse with Aimée. A sudden passion for excursions seemed to have seized the Joscelyns, who had hitherto seen as little as possible of the different places in which they had unwillingly sojourned, and who had seemed quite insensible to any claims of art or history upon their attention. Now, however, they discovered that the neighborhood of Venice abounded in places of interest; and Lydia arranged one excursion after another to the adjacent islands, excursions which Kyrle was invited to join, and during which he was carefully kept as much as possible apart from Aimée.
The tactics by which this was managed were beautifully simple. He found himself sitting by Miss Joscelyn’s side in a gondola, carrying her shawl, offering her his arm whenever the need for an arm arose, without in the least understanding how it all came about. But one of the lookers-on understood perfectly, and laughed to herself with an amusement not untinctured by malice. “He declined my aid,” Mrs. Meredith thought, “so I shall leave him to Lydia’s mercy. A man, poor creature, is so helpless in such a case!”
This man was certainly very helpless. There was not in him any of the tincture of brutality which exists in men who can release themselves from such a position by the simplest and most direct methods. He could not be deaf when a woman asked for assistance; he could not refuse to hold a parasol over her when she requested him to do so, nor leave her alone when, falling behind the others, she pleaded fatigue and begged to “rest a little.” They were all threadbare artifices, but still strong enough to hold one who to the instincts of a gentleman in such matters added a certain hopelessness with regard to his own affairs. For, after all, he said to himself, he had made up his mind not to compromise Aimée by attentions of a loverlike character, and it was well that Lydia Joscelyn should help him to keep this somewhat difficult resolution.