“I object to your trying to make mischief, Mr. Buckland, between Lady Jennings and me.”
“I don’t want to make mischief, Miss Davison; I want to get your friends to take more care of you.”
His tone was so quiet, so stubborn, that she looked frightened again. There was something feminine, helpless about her look and manner when she was threatened, which touched him and made him sorry that he had to seem so harsh. But remembering as he did the reference made by Lady Jennings to the doctrine of “doubles,” he was sure that the old lady guessed something, and he knew that, at all costs, he must find out the meaning of what he had seen.
After a short pause, Miss Davison burst into a light laugh.
“My friends, Mr. Buckland, my real friends,” she said coolly, “have a strong impression that I don’t need looking after, that I can take care of myself.”
“Yes, I’ve no doubt you can take all the care of yourself that a girl can take,” said he boldly; “but that is not enough, Miss Davison, if I may daresay so, in the case of a lady as beautiful as you are and as determined to let nothing stand in the way of carrying out her ambitions.”
Miss Davison, who had by this time quite recovered her outward serenity, laughed.
“I can’t see what ambition would be served by standing about in a London crowd in clothes not one’s own,” she said. “It sounds to me like the act of a lunatic; but as Lady Jennings considers me eccentric already, I have no doubt, if you were to choose to put the notion into her head, she would think me quite capable of what you suggest you saw me do. In that case I should simply have to leave her house, where I am very comfortable and very useful to her. For she would certainly worry my life out, and I would not submit to that from anybody.”
Gerard bowed, but he did not promise, as she wished him to do, to say nothing to Lady Jennings. There was another short silence.
“I am afraid you will think me a bore, Miss Davison, for obtruding upon you so long,” said he, in another attempt to get away.