‘There, don’t be vexed, you’ll have too much of kissing some day, you know. Come out in the boat with me. You’re the most troublesome boy I ever knew. There’s no keeping you in order in the house.’
So he would follow her obediently, with his longing still ungratified, and always looking forward to a luckier to-morrow. Whoever had been her instructor, Miss Nora Abinger had certainly learnt the art of keeping a man at her feet. Perhaps the same thought struck him also, for one day, when they were alone together, he asked her if he were the only man she had ever loved. Nora looked at him with the keenest appreciation lurking in the corners of her mirthful eyes.
‘Are you the only man I’ve ever loved, Ilfracombe?’ she repeated after him. ‘Well, I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so? Good heavens, do you mean to tell me you’ve had lovers beside myself!’ he exclaimed, getting into a sudden fury.
‘My dear boy, do you know how old I am? Twenty, last birthday! What are you dreaming of? Do you suppose all the men in Malta are deaf, dumb, and blind? Of course I’ve had other lovers—scores of them!’
‘But you didn’t love them, Nora; not as you love me,’ Lord Ilfracombe asked anxiously.
‘Well, before I can answer that question, we must decide how much I do love you. Anyway, I didn’t marry any of them, though I might have had a dozen husbands by this time if I had accepted them all. As it is, you see, I chucked them over.’
‘But were you engaged to any of them, Nora?’ he persisted.
She might easily have said ‘no,’ but it was not in this girl’s nature to deceive. She was frankly naughty, defiantly so, some people might have said, and rather glorified in her faults than otherwise. Besides, she dearly loved to tease her lover, and tyrannise over him.
‘Oh, yes I was,’ she replied, ‘that is, I had a kind of a sort of an engagement with several of them. But it amounted to nothing. There was only one of the whole lot I shed a single tear for.’