‘No, dear, no,’ she said, ‘it’s all right, and you must have some tea—we’ll have it on the lawn. John, don’t tease them any more. Albert’s uncle is the gentleman I told you about. And, my dear children, this is my brother that I haven’t seen for three years.’
‘Then he’s a long-lost too,’ said H. O.
The lady said ‘Not now’ and smiled at him.
And the rest of us were dumb with confounding emotions. Oswald was particularly dumb. He might have known it was her brother, because in rotten grown-up books if a girl kisses a man in a shrubbery that is not the man you think she’s in love with; it always turns out to be a brother, though generally the disgrace of the family and not a respectable chaplain from Calcutta.
The lady now turned to her reverend and surprising brother and said, ‘John, go and tell them we’ll have tea on the lawn.’
When he was gone she stood quite still a minute. Then she said, ‘I’m going to tell you something, but I want to put you on your honour not to talk about it to other people. You see it isn’t everyone I would tell about it. He, Albert’s uncle, I mean, has told me a lot about you, and I know I can trust you.’
We said ‘Yes’, Oswald with a brooding sentiment of knowing all too well what was coming next.
The lady then said, ‘Though I am not Albert’s uncle’s grandmother I did know him in India once, and we were going to be married, but we had a—a—misunderstanding.’
‘Quarrel?’ Row?’ said Noel and H. O. at once.
‘Well, yes, a quarrel, and he went away. He was in the Navy then. And then... well, we were both sorry, but well, anyway, when his ship came back we’d gone to Constantinople, then to England, and he couldn’t find us. And he says he’s been looking for me ever since.’