“Oh, no! Well—it would have to come out pretty soon, anyhow. Jackie, I have a terrible confession to make.”
“Confession?”
“Yes—don’t look as if you thought I was going to say I had been engaged before, or something. You will be surprised at first, but afterward you will be perfectly delighted. Oh, Jackie! I have leased Ordham for five years.”
“What?” Ordham rose slowly to his feet. There was a red stain on his face; he looked as if he had been struck. “What? I don’t understand.”
“I have always wanted it so much! I couldn’t resist when Lady Bridgminster said your brother was so anxious to break the entail—to make money out of the place. Of course I was not such a fool as to buy what will one day be ours, but it was my own idea to lease it, and I think it a very bright one. My, but he charged a price! Bobby was furious. But I don’t care if you will only stay. What is money for? Don’t look at me like that!”
“I am very much surprised.”
Ordham walked slowly to the end of the room and back again. Then he confronted his wife. “It was my right to be consulted,” he said, with his elaborate gentle courtesy, which Mabel had yet to learn might cover a very fury of anger, cold resentment, or the instinct of self-protection on the alert.
“You would never have consented,” she said ingenuously. “You would have said, ‘What is the use?’ You were so bent on going abroad.”
“Of course.”
“I am sure that when you have thought it over you will simply love the idea of this wonderful old castle being really your own instead of waiting and waiting and waiting for it. It is horrid, waiting for people to die, anyhow.”