"To the heart of his vanity—that's where you cut. You've humiliated him certainly; but surely he deserved it? In any case, you've given young Manister the right-about; and upon my soul that's rather a performance for our Tiny! I should only like to have seen it."
"It's good of you to call me your Tiny," returned the young girl rather coldly. "But don't talk to me about performances, please, unless you mean disgraceful performances. I wish I had never come to England—I wish I was back in Australia—I wish I was up at the station!" she cried with sudden passion. "I am miserable, and you won't understand me; and Ruth couldn't if she tried."
"My dear girl," Erskine said in rather an injured tone, "surely you're a little unfair on us both? Ruth will understand when I tell her; and as for me—I think I understand you already."
"Not you!" answered Tiny disdainfully. "You call it a performance! You treat it as a joke!" And she left him, with the tears in her eyes.
He watched her enter the garden by the little gate lower down, and saunter toward the house with lagging steps. The low sun streamed upon her drooping figure. Even at that distance, and with her face hidden from him, she seemed to Erskine the incarnation of all that was wayward and willful and sweet in girlhood. And her tears and temper made her doubly sweet, as the rain draws new fragrance from a flower; but they had also made her doubly difficult to understand. One moment he had seen her plainly, as in the lime light; in another, she had retired to a deeper shade than before. The explanation of her conduct toward Lord Manister had been a sufficiently startling revelation, yet a perfectly lucid one; but what of this prompt transition to tears and penitence? The only interpretation which suggested itself to Erskine was one that he refused to entertain. He preferred to attribute Christina's present state of mind to mere reaction; if the reaction had taken a rather hysterical form, that, perhaps, was not to be wondered at. Moreover, this seemed to be indeed the case; for the girl was seen no more that day, save by Ruth, who by night was perhaps the most disappointed person in the parish; only she managed to conceal her disappointment in a way that it was impossible not to admire.
Nevertheless dinner at the rectory was a dismal meal, and the more so for the high spirits of Herbert, which, meeting with no response, turned to silence. Poor Herbert happened to have distinguished himself in the match, which, indeed, he had been largely instrumental in winning for his side; but neither Ruth nor her husband showed any interest in his exploit, and Tiny was not there. Erskine was no cricketer; Herbert hated him for it, and made a sullen attack on the claret. But at length it dawned upon him that there was some special reason for the silence and glum looks at either end of the table, for which Christina's alleged headache would not in itself account; and when Ruth left the table early to look after Tiny, he said bluntly to Erskine:
"You're enough to give a fellow the blues, the pair of you! What's wrong? Have I done anything, or has Tiny?"
Erskine temporized, pushing forward the claret. "I understand you have done something," he said with a first approach to geniality; "but, upon my word, old fellow, I don't know what it is. I couldn't listen, for the life of me; and you must forgive me. Tiny's upset, and that's upset Ruth, which I suppose has upset me in my turn. Please call me names—I deserve them—and then tell me again what you have done."
Herbert did not require two invitations to do this. He had not only acquitted himself brilliantly, but there was a peculiar piquancy in his success; he had saved the side which had treated him with unobtrusive but galling contempt until the last moment, when he opened their eyes, and their throats too. They had put him to field at short leg; during the intervals, after the fall of a wicket, not one of them had spoken a word to him, save good-natured Mr. Willoughby; and they had sent him in last, with hopeless faces, when there were many runs to get. The good batsmen, beginning with Lord Manister, had mostly failed miserably. The Honorable Stanley Dromard, who had been in fine form all the week, had alone done well; and he was still at the wicket when Herbert whipped in, with his ears full of gratuitous instructions to keep his wicket up, and not to try to hit the professional, and his heart full of other designs. Those instructions were given without much knowledge of this young Australian, who took a sincere delight in disregarding them. He had hit out from the very first, particularly at the professional, who disliked being hit, and who was also somewhat demoralized by the extreme respect with which he had been treated by preceding batsmen. There were thirty runs to make when Herbert went in, and in a quarter of an hour he made them nearly all from his own bat, exhibiting an almost insolent amount of coolness and nerve at the crisis. The best of it was that no one had considered it a crisis when he went in; but his truculent batting had immediately made it one, and ultimately, in a scene of the greatest excitement, of which Herbert was the hero, an almost certain defeat had been converted into a glorious victory. All this was confirmed by the local newspaper next day; considering his achievement and his character, the hero himself told his tale with modesty.
"He bowled like beggary," he concluded, in allusion to the discomfited professional; "but I tell you, old toucher, we were too many measles for him!"