"Has he not?" said Tiny with dry satire.
"He has never got over it," repeated Lady Dromard in a tone which was a match for the other. "Has the girl?"
Tiny was startled in her turn. She hesitated before replying, and seemed to waver over the nature of her reply. It was the first sign she had shown of wavering at all, and Lady Dromard drew her breath. The girl was hanging her head, and murmuring that she really could not answer for the other girl. Suddenly she flung up her face, and it was hot, but not hotter than her words:
"Yes, Lady Dromard, you are his mother. But the girl was my friend. He treated her abominably!"
"It wasn't his fault—it was mine," said Lady Dromard steadily.
"I'm afraid that does not make one think any better of him," murmured the young girl. Her chin was resting in her hand. The flush had passed from her face as suddenly as it had come. Her eyes were raised to the sky out of the window, and there was in them the sad, hardened, reckless look that those who knew her best had seen too often, latterly, in her silent moments. The sun was dropping clear of the clouds, and the brighter rays fell kindly over Tiny's dark hair and pale, piquant face. The keen eye that was on her had never watched more closely nor admired so much.
"Consider!" said Lady Dromard presently, and rather gently. "Try to put yourself in our place—and consider. We have a position, here in England, of which very few people can be got to take a sensible view; half the country professes an absurd contempt for it, while the other half speaks of it and of us with bated breath. We ourselves naturally think something of our position, and we try, as we say, to keep it up. Of course we are worldly, in the popular sense. We bring up our children with worldly ideas. They must make worldly marriages in their own station. Is it so very contemptible that we should see to this, and dread beyond most things an unwise or an unequal marriage? Now do consider: we let our son go out to Australia, because it is good for a young man to see the world before he marries and settles down—and mind! that was what he was about to do. If he had not gone to Australia then, he would have been married at once. He was all but engaged. It was a case of putting off the engagement instead of the marriage. We do not believe in long, formal engagements; we do not permit them. We find them undesirable for many reasons. So, you see, he goes out to Australia as good as engaged, but unable to say so, and very young, and no doubt very susceptible. Can you wonder that I tremble for him when he has gone? Well, he is the best son in the world, and has told me everything always. That is my comfort. But presently he tells one things in his letters which make one tremble more than ever, though he tells them jokingly. Then a cousin of Lord Dromard's stays a day or two in Melbourne and comes home with a report——"
Christina's face twitched in the sunlight. "I suppose that was Captain Dromard?" she said quietly; "I never met him, but I saw him." She seemed to see him then, and that was why her face twitched. She was still staring out of the window at the yellowing sky.
"Captain Dromard had forgotten the girl's name," said the countess pointedly; "but he told me enough to make me write to my boy—I nearly cabled! And do you think I was wrong?"
"Not from your point of view, Lady Dromard," answered Christina judicially, with her eyes half closed in the slanting sunbeams which she chose to face. "Certainly you cannot have had very much faith in Lord Manister's judgment; but the case is altered if he was to all intents and purposes engaged to a girl in England; and, at all events, that's the worst that could be said of you—looking at it from your own point of view. But is not the girl out there entitled to a point of view as well?" And the hardened reckless eyes were turned so suddenly upon Lady Dromard that the youth and grace and bitterness of the girl smote her straight to the heart.