She glanced across at the young girl, pointing, with her keen gaze, words which seemed trivial enough. And Mary, her calm forehead puckered with a certain vague annoyance which she disdained to analyse, understood perfectly all that the elder lady was too discreet to say. She sat for a little while, her hands resting idly in her lap, or smoothing the creases out of her long, soft gloves. Then she rose and moved quickly across to Lady Garnett's side, knelt suddenly down by her chair.
"Ah, my aunt!" she cried impulsively, "tell me what is to be done?"
Lady Garnett glanced up from the novel into which she had subsided; she laid it on the little tea-table with a sigh of relief at this sudden mood of confidence, coming a little strangely amidst the young girl's habitual reticence.
"We will talk, my dear," she said, "now you are practical. I suppose, by the way, he has not proposed?"
Mary shook her head.
"That is it, Aunt Marcelle! That is exactly what I want to prevent.
Is—is he going to?"
Lady Garnett smiled, and her smile had a very definite quality indeed.
"I would not cherish any false hopes, my dear. Charles Sylvester is a young man—not so very young though, by the way—whose conclusions are very slow, but when they arrive, mon Dieu! they are durable. I am sure he is terribly tenacious. It took him a long time to conclude that he was in love with you; at first, you know, he was a little troubled about your fortune, but at last he came to that conclusion—at Lucerne."
"Oh, at Lucerne!" protested the young girl with a nervous laugh.
"Surely not there!"
"It was precisely at Lucerne," continued Lady Garnett, "that he decided you would make him an adorable wife, and, in effect, it was a considerable piece of wisdom. And since then his conclusions have been more rapid. The last has been that he will certainly marry you—with or without a dot—before the elections. You are serious, you know, my dear, though not so serious as he believes; you are a girl of intelligence, and he is going to stand for some place or other, and candidates with clever wives often obtain a majority over candidates who are clever but have no wives. Yes, my dear, he is certainly going to propose. You may postpone it by the use of great tact for a month or so; you will hardly do so for longer."