“She’s both, but none the less interesting.”
“Oh, she’s interesting, all right. But she’s become such an adept at bluffing herself that I doubt if she always knows just where she’s at. Just now she’s bluffed—or hypnotized?—herself into thinking she’s interested in me. But I have an idea she could switch off in the opposite direction as easily.”
“Julia is a bit odd,” admitted Ishbel. “Especially since she came back from the East. Even before she went, she wasn’t much like anybody else, owing, no doubt, to that strange old mother of hers; but au fond she’s the most loyal and sincere of mortals. And it takes matrimony—a love-match—to clear a woman’s brain of cobwebs. Marry Julia and take her to the young world, and I’ll venture to say she’ll forget all she learned in the East, and a good part of her inheritance. Then she’ll be the most charming of women.”
“That’s the way I talk to myself when I’m not in the dumps. But do you really want her to marry an American? It would be more like you to want to keep her over here.”
“I did once plot and scheme to make her marry a very dear friend of us all, Lord Haverfield—Nigel Herbert—you must have read his books.”
“Ah!”
“That was rather imprudent of me. But it’s all over long ago. Julia never cared for him, and I have always said that when she did care for any man, I’d turn match-maker in earnest and do all I could to help him marry her—that is, if I liked him—and we’re all quite in love with you.” She flashed the sweetness of her charming countenance on him, and he thought her almost as beautiful as Julia. “I want her to be happy, for she was once terribly unhappy. Her experience was truly awful —”
“I never want to think of it,” said Tay, hastily. “I refuse to remember that she has ever been married. Look at here—will you promise to be on my side if she goes off on one of her tangents?”
“I will!” and she gave his hand a little shake. She longed to tell him that France might die any minute, but she had once more given her word to Bridgit, and could only hope that France would take himself off before Tay left England. “But if the worst comes to the worst, I’ll get round it somehow,” she thought.
A moment later a rapid change of partners was effected, Tay threw his arm lightly round Julia’s waist, and they waltzed down the lake to the amazement of the less agile Germans.