“I can forgive her for flirting with Robert,” said Belle; “he is such a quaint old dear. But... John!”
“I refuse,” said the vicar with gentle firmness, “to entertain any unworthy thought of her in that connection. She has probably succeeded in discovering in John what you and I have failed in discovering—the vein of youthfulness he has concealed so successfully all these years. Forty is the prime of life. It will not surprise me in the least if John proves himself to be more youthful than Miss Annersley.”
“She is only twenty-eight,” said Belle.
“John is younger than that in experience,” he replied. “I am beginning to believe that at heart he is still a boy. No man who was not a boy at heart could have concentrated so much energy and earnest endeavour upon an exercise at once unfamiliar and distasteful. A boy will do what he dislikes doing if he recognises that the doing is expected of him; a man studies in preference his inclination. You cannot urge that John’s inclination tends, towards dancing.”
“No,” she answered. “But I can dispute your point, because plainly John’s inclination tends towards pleasing Peggy.”
“Well, yes,” the vicar conceded. “I begin to believe you are right.”
If he entertained the smallest doubt on that head, the doubt would have been dispelled could he have looked at the moment upon the picture of Mr Musgrave seated with his late partner in a retired spot, screened from the curious by tall palms and other pot-plants, to which retreat Peggy had led him, as she led only her favoured partners, at the finish of the dance. Mr Musgrave sat forward in his seat, fingering one of the blush roses which had fallen from Peggy’s dress when she left the ballroom. A clumsy movement of his own towards the finish of the dance had been responsible for the damage, as he was well aware. He had picked up the rose when it fell, and he was now smoothing and touching its petals as he held it lightly between his fingers, as once he had smoothed and touched, and idly played with and destroyed, a glove which she had dropped.
“I fear,” he said, “I am in fault for the detachment of this. You will begin to think me a very clumsy person.”
“Those little accidents happen so often when one is dancing,” she replied. “It is of no consequence.”
“It could, perhaps,” he suggested, “be sewn on again.”