When they are about half-way to Chetwoode she plucks up courage to say, although the saying of it costs her a brilliant blush, "Are you my guardian?"
"I call that a most unkind question," says Cyril. "Have I fallen short in any way, that the thought suggests itself? Do you mean to insinuate that I am not guarding you properly now? Am I not taking sufficiently good care of you?"
"You are my guardian then?" says Lilian, with such unmistakable hope in her tones that Cyril laughs outright.
"No, I am not," he says; "I wish I were; though for your own sake it is better as it is. Your guardian is no end a better fellow than I am. He would have come to meet you to-day, but he was obliged to go some miles away on business."
"Business!" thinks Miss Chesney, disdainfully. "Of course it would never do for the goody-goody to neglect his business. Oh, dear! I know we shall not get on at all."
"I am very glad he did not put himself out for me," she says, glancing at Cyril from under her long curling lashes. "It would have been a pity, as I have not missed him at all."
"I feel intensely grateful to you for that speech," says Cyril. "When Guy cuts me out later on,—as he always does,—I shall still have the memory of it to fall back upon."
"Is this Chetwoode?" Lilian asks, five minutes later, as they pass through the entrance gate. "What a charming avenue!"—putting her head out of the window, "and so dark. I like it dark; it reminds me of"—she pauses, and two large tears come slowly, slowly into her blue eyes and tremble there—"my home," she says in a low tone.
"You must try to be happy with us," Cyril says, kindly, taking one of her hands and pressing it gently, to enforce his sympathy; and then the horses draw up at the hall door, and he helps her to alight, and presently she finds herself within the doors of Chetwoode.