"Good-bye," she replied with unconcern. "Come back when you're in a better temper. Won't you take your flowers?"
She held out Melville's offering, and it proved the last straw. Sir Ross controlled himself by a heroic effort, but vouchsafed no answer to this feminine last word. He departed in a frame of mind that was positively dangerous.
"He'll come back," Mrs. Sinclair said cheerfully to Lucille, who had been a witness of the baronet's exit, but the maid shook her head.
"I don't fancy he will," she said. She was sorry, for Sir Ross's title appealed to her imagination, and she had anticipated with satisfaction her mistress's promotion in the social scale. "I've never seen Sir Ross so put out before, and I don't fancy he will come back."
"Then he can stay away," Mrs. Sinclair replied; "but it's as well to begin as you mean to go on, and if he is so eccentric before marriage I don't suppose he'd be any better afterwards. Fancy his objecting to Mr. Ashley coming here!"
"I shouldn't think much of him if he didn't object," Lucille answered primly. "Any man who is a man dislikes another man paying attention to his young lady. Mr. Ashley brought those flowers, ma'am."
Mrs. Sinclair laughed; the philosophy of the remark amused her, and her mistake about the bouquet struck her as really funny. She looked at herself in the mirror, and put back a curl of hair that had strayed out of place. Then she picked up the flowers.
"How sweet of Mr. Ashley to think of them," she said. "I must go and thank him at once," and, still bubbling over with amusement, she went into the drawing-room. But, outside, Lucille still shook her head.
"It's a mistake," she said to herself, "and she'll live to regret it, I'm sure."