“You’re mistaken, Adam. I do forgive you.”
He caught the two hands in his, and his face shivered.
“God bless you, dear,” he tried to say, and he kissed the hands twice.
When Mrs. Bowring looked up he was sitting beside her, just as before; but his face was terribly drawn, and strange, and a great tear had trickled down the furrowed brown cheek into the grey beard.
CHAPTER XI
Lady Johnstone was one of those perfectly frank and honest persons who take no trouble to conceal their anxieties. From the fact that when she had met him on the way up to the hotel Brook had been walking alone with Clare Bowring, she had at once argued that a considerable intimacy existed between the two. Her meeting with Clare’s mother, and her sudden fancy for the elder woman, had momentarily allayed her fears, but they revived when it became clear to her that Brook sought every possible opportunity of being alone with the young girl. She was an eminently practical woman, as has been said, which perhaps accounted for her having made a good husband out of such a man as Adam Johnstone had been in his youth. She had never seen Brook devote himself to a young girl before now. She saw that Clare was good to look at, and she promptly concluded that Brook must be in love. The conclusion was perfectly correct, and Lady Johnstone soon grew very nervous. Brook was too young to marry, and even if he had been old enough his mother thought that he might have made a better choice. At all events he should not entangle himself in an engagement with the girl; and she began systematically to interfere with his attempts to be alone with her. Brook was as frank as herself. He charged her with trying to keep him from Clare, and she did not deny that he was right. This led to a discussion on the third day after the Johnstones’ arrival.
“You mustn’t make a fool of yourself, Brook, dear,” said Lady Johnstone. “You are not old enough to marry. Oh, I know, you are five-and-twenty, and ought to have come to years of discretion. But you haven’t, dear boy. Don’t forget that you are Adam Johnstone’s son, and that you may be expected to do all the things that he did before I married him. And he did a good many things, you know. I’m devoted to your father, and if he were in the room I should tell you just what I am telling you now. Before I married him he had about a thousand flirtations, and he had been married too, and had gone off with an actress—a shocking affair altogether! And his wife had divorced him. She must have been one of those horrible women who can’t forgive, you know. Now, my dear boy, you aren’t a bit better than your father, and that pretty Clare Bowring looks as though she would never forgive anybody who did anything she didn’t like. Have you asked her to marry you?”
“Good heavens, no!” cried Brook. “She wouldn’t look at me!”