"You might conceivably have some ground for objecting to Mr. Ashley visiting me if he were not related to me," she said coldly, "though even then I should think you unreasonable. But he is related to me, so your objection is merely absurd. Whatever you may do after we are married, you cannot revise my visiting list now."
"How is he related to you?" Sir Ross asked angrily, but that was a question which Mrs. Sinclair did not choose to answer. Sir Ross knew all about Mr. Sinclair, with whom Lavender really believed her marriage to have been perfectly legal, but he did not know anything about Sir Geoffrey Holt, and Lavender was particularly anxious that he should not. The only command she had laid upon Melville was that he should not talk about his uncle, and he had faithfully obeyed her. As potential husbands are not in the habit of discussing their predecessors in that office, she knew that Sir Ross would not talk about Mr. Sinclair, so that there had been no difficulty on that score either. Thus Melville was in ignorance of the fact that there ever had been any Mr. Sinclair, and Sir Ross was in ignorance, if not of Sir Geoffrey Holt's existence, at any rate of the part he had played in Lavender Sinclair's life. But for the impulse which had prompted her to claim Melville as her nephew, all the facts might have remained in the oblivion into which they had sunk.
"Very well," said Sir Ross, as Lavender remained silent, "if I cannot yet revise your visiting list, I can put you to your election between this person and myself. I have the honour to be your accepted suitor, and I object to this gentleman's attentions. You will be so good as to choose between him and me. If in defiance of my wishes you continue to receive him I shall absent myself from your house and consider our engagement at an end. If you are unwilling that that should occur you will dismiss Mr. Ashley as summarily as you took him up. I require you to choose between him and me, and I will come to-morrow for your answer. Good afternoon!" and unceremoniously hurrying into the hall he crammed his hat upon his head and marched away in high dudgeon.
But fortune still favoured Melville, or else it was Destiny leading him by easy gradations down to his destruction. For when the morrow came, bright and sunny, he found that he had no engagements until the evening, and determined to while away part of the time by chatting with his aunt. He therefore sauntered leisurely towards South Kensington, pausing in Piccadilly to buy some hothouse flowers for her. When he reached The Vale, Mrs. Sinclair was engaged with a dressmaker, and Melville, leaving the flowers in the hall, was shown into the drawing-room to wait her pleasure. Lucille brought the message asking him to wait, and was on the point of returning upstairs when the bell rang again. She opened the door and saw Sir Ross Buchanan, to whose cause with her mistress she was a staunch adherent. Instead of going upstairs to enquire whether Mrs. Sinclair was at home to him, Lucille took it upon herself to ask him, too, to wait, and ushered him into the drawing-room where Melville already was.
"There isn't any love lost between those two gentlemen," she thought as she opened the drawing-room door and noticed the change in Sir Ross's expression when his eye fell upon Melville, "and I'll give them the opportunity of having a few words. If Sir Ross is the man I take him for, he'll make it clear to Mr. Ashley that his room is preferred to his company."
Melville greeted Sir Ross cheerfully, ignoring the scowl upon the little baronet's face.
"Nice and cool in here," he remarked. "Mrs. Sinclair is engaged—frocks and frills, I understand, and all that sort of thing."
"I didn't have the impertinence to ask particulars," snapped Sir Ross, "and I don't take any interest in the details of ladies' toilettes."
"No?" said Melville. "That's a mistake; you should always be interested in what interests women, and nothing interests them so much as frocks—except frills."
"I don't require any lessons in how to deal with women, thanks," said Sir Ross.