For the positions of the three occupants of the room he had entered struck him as being singular.
“Yes,” cried Oldroyd, “very wrong. I, being a poor surgeon and general practitioner, have been asking your mother’s consent to Lucy’s becoming my wife.”
“And Lucy?” said Alleyne softly.
“Oh, yes, Moray, dear Moray,” she cried, hiding her face in his breast.
“I am very glad, Oldroyd,” said Alleyne, quietly. “I have thought of it sometimes, and wondered whether it would come to this, and—and I am very very glad.”
He held out his hand and grasped the young doctor’s very warmly, before kissing his sister, after which she escaped to her room, where she stayed for quite an hour before coming down shyly, and with a very happy look in her eyes.
Oldroyd was not gone. It was not likely. He had been staying with Alleyne in the observatory—watching his case as he told himself, but not succeeding in his self-deceit, and some kind of natural attraction led him back into the dining-room just as Lucy entered from the other door.
It must have been a further charge of natural attraction that led them straight into each other’s arms, for the first long embrace and kiss, from which Lucy started back at last, all shame-faced, rosy-red, and with the sensation that she had just been guilty of something very wicked indeed.
“Are you happy, Lucy?” said Oldroyd.
“No,” she said, looking at him earnestly, “and I shall not be till others are happy too.”