Piers looked troubled at this, and said: “I know, sir, and I do not like it above half! For, in point of fact, I first found Beverley, only you told-me not to say sol’
“I hope you did not?”
“No, because it is so excessively awkward, on account of Miss Daubenay’s presence in the spinney! But if she has said that she went there to meet Pen—”
“You had better continue to preserve a discreet silence, my dear boy. The knowledge that you also were in the spinney would merely confuse poor Mr Philips. You see, I have the advantage of knowing who killed Brandon.”
“I think,” said Pen judicially, “we ought to tell Piers about the diamond necklace, sir.”
“By all means,” agreed Sir Richard.
The history of the diamond necklace, as recounted by Miss Creed, made Mr Luttrell forget for a few moments his graver preoccupations. He seemed very much more the Piers of her childhood when he exclaimed: “What an adventure!” and by the time he had described to her his surprise at receiving a visit from Beverley, whom he had known but slightly up at Oxford; and had exchanged impressions of Captain Horace Trimble, they were once more upon very good terms. Sir Richard, who thought that his own interests would best be served by allowing Pen uninterrupted intercourse with Mr Luttrell, soon left them to themselves; and after Piers had once more felicitated Pen on her choice of a husband—felicitations which she received in embarrassed silence—the talk soon returned to his own difficulties.
She listened to his enraptured description of Miss Daubenay with as much patience as she could muster, but when he begged her not to divulge her sex to the lady for fear lest her nice sense of propriety might suffer too great a shock, she was so much incensed that she was betrayed into giving him her opinion of Miss Daubenay’s morals and manners. A pretty squabble at once flared up, and might have ended in Piers’ stalking out of Pen’s life for ever had she not remembered, just as he reached the door, that she had engaged herself to further his pretensions to Lydia’s hand.
It took a few moments’ coaxing to persuade him to relax his air of outraged dignity, but when it was borne in upon him that Lydia had summoned Pen to her side that morning, he did seem to feel that such forward conduct called for an explanation. Pen waved his excuses aside, however. “I don’t mind that, if only she would not cry so much!” she said.
Mr Luttrell said that his Lydia was all sensibility, and deprecated, with obvious sincerity, a suggestion that a wife suffering from an excess of sensibility might prove to be a tiresome acquisition. As he seemed to feel that the support of Lydia was his life’s work, Pen abandoned all thought of trying to wean him from his attachment to the lady, and announced her plans for his speedy marriage.