“Dash it, Kit, I can’t tell you how you should go on!” protested Freddy, horrified. “I ain’t in the petticoat-line! Told you so at the start!”
“Of course not! You forget that your Mama will take care of me. Indeed, you have no cause to be uneasy!”
This reminder went some way towards allaying his fears, but a rare instinct for danger prompted him to demand: “Tell me this! Have you some scheme in your head I don’t know about?”
“Yes,” said Kitty, incurably truthful, “I have!” She observed the look of a hunted wild creature in his eyes, and clasped his hand in a sustaining way. “But it is nothing you would dislike!” she added. “I give you my word it is not, Freddy!” She saw that this very handsome assurance had not had the desired effect, and said reproachfully: “Freddy! Don’t you believe me? When I have pledged you my word!”
“It ain’t that I don’t believe you, Kit,” he explained gloomily. “Thing is, I’m dashed sure you don’t know what I should dislike! Lord, I wish I were well out of it!”
It was now Miss Charing’s turn to change colour. “You don’t mean—oh, you cannot mean to cry off?” she faltered.
“No, I don’t!” responded Freddy, stung. “Never hedged off in my life! Play or pay, m’dear girl, play or pay! All I say is, wish I hadn’t said I’d play! The next time I see that fat rascal of a landlord—!”
“Pluckley?” said Kitty, bewildered.
“That’s the fellow,” nodded Freddy, darkling. “That bowl of punch! Never ordered it! Oughtn’t to have had it. No, and, what’s more, oughtn’t to have let you have it either! No sense in wrapping it up in clean linen, Kit: must have been bosky, both of us!”
Nothing would move him from this standpoint, so Kitty, wisely abandoning the attempt, applied her energies to the task of reassuring him.