'Which way have you come?' Mr. Hawtrey asked, after they had shaken hands.
'We went over the Brunig Pass to Interlaken; we stopped there a day or two and came from Thun over the Simmenthal to Aigle; we stayed there four days, and a day at St. Maurice, and got in here half an hour after you had started, and have since been for a stroll among the pines.'
'We were over at St. Maurice the day before yesterday.'
'It is splendid up here,' Ada Fortescue put in; 'we have been grumbling ever since we came because we did not come on here at once instead of spending those four days at Lucerne. It was all very lovely, but it was so hot one really could not enjoy it as one ought to have done. Up here it is so deliciously cool, at least except in the middle of the day, that one feels up to anything. I wish you could persuade papa to let us go up one of the mountains; not a difficult one, of course. At present mamma won't hear of it; though Mr. Hawtrey said he would go with us and Dorothy. I don't think papa would mind,' she added confidentially.
Captain Armstrong smiled. Mr. Fortescue was really but a cipher in the family. He accompanied his wife and daughters, and was very useful in looking after the luggage and paying bills, but his wife was the real manager of the party. She was not one of those women who assert their predominance over their husbands; upon the contrary, she made a point of consulting him on everything, but as his opinions were always in accord with hers, this was little more than a form. She herself, among her intimates, frequently bewailed her husband's disinclination to take a leading part in anything.
'It is a great disadvantage to the girls, for it compels me to put myself much more forward than I like. It is always bad for a mother to have to do so; it gets her the name of being a managing woman, and there is nothing men are more shy of.' And yet in spite of Mrs. Fortescue's disclaimer, there were people who believed that if Mr. Fortescue had had a chance there would have been no occasion for his wife to take matters so entirely in hand as she did. Within an hour of meeting Captain Armstrong and Mr. Fitzwarren, she had discussed the matter with her husband.
'I don't know what to think of these men coming here just as we have arrived. It must mean one thing or the other.'
Mr. Fortescue remarked that no doubt it did.
'Captain Armstrong is of course an excellent match,' she said. 'The question is, has he come here on his own account or on that of Mr. Fitzwarren? If on his own account, it must be in order to see more of one of our girls, or of Dorothy Hawtrey. On the other hand, Mr. Fitzwarren cannot be considered at all an eligible person; of course he is in society, and all that sort of thing, and is very well connected, but that won't keep up a household. It would not do at all, and I shall warn Ada and Clara that they are not to think of flirting with him, and that if I see any signs of them doing so we shall at once move away.'
'He is a very pleasant young man,' Mr. Fortescue said. 'I believe he has a good position in the Foreign Office, and is private secretary to Lord Wolverhouse.'