“Of course I do. She is absolutely determined to marry him and go out with him at once. I can’t refuse my consent—and I shan’t—and they’re not dependent upon yours, Charles.”
She looked at him with a rather nervous defiance, but Sir Charles said with great calm:
“Certainly they’re not. I shall therefore consider the subject closed, so far as my objections go.”
He kept his word, as he invariably did.
The wedding of Rita and Richard took place six weeks later.
Rita was little and very pretty, with big dark eyes, a pathetic baby face, and, in rather quaint contrast, a very erect little figure and a decided bearing.
Unlike her stepfather, the majority of her friends and relations fully realised the beautiful recklessness of Rita’s love-match.
“A very gallant little lady!” said an old friend of Lady Clyde’s, and she reversed an opinion which she had hitherto held as to his senility. He used the same phrase, which had evidently caught his ancient fancy, when the bride was making her farewells, and it oddly suited her appearance, in a velvet dress and a three-cornered hat with a long plume, vaguely recalling pictures of cavalier heroines.
“So she’s marrying all for love, and going eight thousand miles away from home!” said Rita’s aged admirer. “None of your mercenary, modern, ideas there. A gallant little lady, I call her.”