Colin had seen throughout this fortnight Raymond’s improvement of his position with regard to Lord Yardley, and he had felt himself jealously powerless to stop it. Once he had tried, with some sunnily-told tale of Raymond’s ill-temper, to put the brake on it, but his father had stopped him before he was half through with it. “Raymond’s doing very well,” he said. “I don’t want to hear anything against him.” A further light was shed for Colin that evening.
He and Violet, when the rubber of whist was over and Lady Yardley had gone upstairs, strolled out into the hot dusk of the terrace with linked arms, but with no more stir of emotion in their hearts than two schoolboy friends, whose intimacy was to be severed by a month of holiday, would have experienced. The shadow cast by the long yew hedge from the moon near to its setting had enveloped them in its clear darkness, the starlight glimmered on the lake below, and in the elms beyond the nightingales chanted.
“Listen at them, look at it all,” said Colin impatiently. “Starlight and shadow and nightingales and you and me as cool as cucumbers. You look frightfully attractive, too, to-night, Vi: why on earth don’t I fall madly in love with you?”
“Oh, my dear, don’t!” said Violet. “You might make me fall in love with you. But I suppose I needn’t be afraid. You can’t fall in love with anybody, Colin, and I daresay I can’t either. But I shall try.”
“And what do you mean by that?” asked Colin.
“It’s pretty obvious,” she said.
“Raymond, do you mean?” asked Colin.
“Of course. What’s come over him? There’s something attractive about him, after all; he’s got charm. Who would have thought it?”
Though Colin had just now truthfully declared that he was in no way in love with his cousin, he felt a pang of jealousy just as authentic as that which the notion of Raymond’s possession of Stanier caused in him.