Lady Olive leaned forward with a beaming smile.
"I should like it immensely," she declared.
"You forget, Olive, that we are going to call on the Annerleys this afternoon," remarked Maud Devereux, in a cold tone of disapprobation. "Luncheon is quite ready, uncle."
Lady Olive gathered up her skirts, and, nodding to me with a comical grimace, took Sir Francis's arm.
"Good-morning, Mr. Arbuthnot. I'm so sorry we can't come. I should like to see how you manage the Black Prince."
"You will have plenty of other opportunities," Sir Francis remarked. "Good-morning, Arbuthnot; be ready about three o'clock."
And so ended my first visit to Devereux Court.
CHAPTER XIV
THE BEGINNING OF DANGER
Before a month had passed I began to feel quite settled at the cottage. My duties, though many, lay within my capacity, and were such as I found pleasure in undertaking. It was impossible for me not to see that Sir Francis Devereux had taken a great and, to others, an unaccountable fancy to me; and occasionally he made such demands upon my time that I found it hard to get through my work. But I never grudged him an hour that I could honestly spare, for every day the prejudice which I had felt against him grew less, and I began to heartily like and pity him. Perhaps this change in my feelings towards him arose chiefly from the fact that he was obviously an unhappy man. The sorrow which was embittering my father's life and clouding mine had laid its hand with almost equal bitterness upon him. And was it not natural? For more than twenty years he had never looked upon the face or heard of the son whom he had loved better than any one else in the world. The heir of Devereux, for all he knew, might have sunk to the lowest depths of vice and degradation, and yet for all that, he must bear the title and, if he chose, take up his abode in the home where his ancestors had lived with honour for many centuries, and at the very best there was a deep blot which nothing could ever efface. The descendant of a long race of mighty soldiers had been publicly pronounced a coward; and yet some day or other, by the inevitable law of nature, he would become the representative of his family. To the stern old soldier I knew well that the thought was agony, and I longed to reassure and comfort him, as I most certainly could have done. But the time was not yet come.