So Aldyth Lorraine was to marry her cousin! For he did not for a moment imagine that he was mistaken in the inference he had drawn from Miss Dawtrey's words. Well, it was not surprising, and yet he was surprised. They were so different. What he had seen of Guy Lorraine had led him to regard him with a sort of good-natured contempt. A fine human animal, he had thought him, a clever sportsman, and not without good qualities, but empty-headed and primed with the self-conceit that often accompanies a vacant mind. Aldyth Lorraine, with her intellectual tastes, her delicate perceptions, her exquisite refinement of mind, to share the life of such a man! What had they in common, except their horsemanship and their love of out-of-door life—in Guy's case it could scarcely be termed "love of Nature?"
Having taken his supper hastily and with little appetite, Glynne plunged into work, and tried to banish these thoughts from his mind. After all, it was no concern of his whom Aldyth might choose to marry. And yet—and yet—one thing had been made clear to him by the talk of the gossips—the fact that had he been in a position to contemplate marriage, Aldyth was the girl he would desire to win. Was she making a free choice in the matter? he asked himself with a sudden thrill.
He remembered how she had said, "I am peculiarly bound to defer to Uncle Stephen's wishes." Could it be that she was being forced into this marriage? No; impossible! She was not the woman to marry under compulsion. The words must have referred to her engagement. They were a confirmation of what Miss Dawtrey had said. Glynne's spirits sank lower as he thought this. Vainly he tried to absorb himself in his work; thoughts of Aldyth would come between him and it, and mingling with them came to mind scraps of "Locksley Hall."
"He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel force,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."
[CHAPTER IX.]
MR. STEPHEN LORRAINE COMES TO AN UNDERSTANDING WITH HIS HEIR.
JOHN GLYNNE would have been surprised could he have known how little Aldyth had enjoyed that ride with her cousin. She had been conscious of something unusual in Guy's manner towards her. He had been more assiduous in his attentions to her than he was wont to be, yet at the same time he had vexed her by contemptuous allusions to John Glynne, and the report that had been circulated in Woodham.
It had become a sore subject with Aldyth, and she was far from appreciating the witticisms in which Guy indulged at her expense. Yet Guy had no intention of annoying her. On the contrary, he meant to try his best to please his cousin. But it was not easy to substitute for the old, free and easy, cousinly intercourse, the new rôle he had taken upon himself. He had not succeeded in his endeavours, and he felt that he had not.
"I shall never be able to do it as I should," he said to himself, as he rode back to Wyndham, after lingering a while in the High Street, in the hope of seeing the Blands. "I wish I had not promised; but Wyndham is worth a sacrifice; though it is hard that a fellow may not choose his own wife." And Guy felt anything but comfortable as he surveyed the position in which he found himself.
A few days earlier Stephen Lorraine had ridden back from Woodham in the worst of humours. He had never accustomed himself to put any kind of restraint on his irritability, and he had no sooner returned, than his household had cause to know that something had "put him out."