It was easy for Sir Edwin to silence curious tongues. He spoke of her quite frankly as his niece, and Hal more or less acquiesced, because it was simpler to arrange an afternoon’s golf, for Dudley had managed to become very thoroughly absorbed in Doris, and she asked no questions.
The only two to raise any real objections were Dick and Alymer Hermon. Dick had to be talked round, and thoroughly impressed with Sir Edwin’s great age (of forty-eight), and though Hal did not state the actual years, she was perfectly correct in insisting that he was old enough to be her father; though she need not perhaps have said it in quite such a tone of ridiculing an absurd idea.
Anyhow, Dick was pacified up to a certain point, and obliged to see that the new friendship did her good, keeping her cheerful and hopeful in spite of her bitter disappointment about Dudley’s engagement, and generally brightening the whole of the winter routine for her.
With Hermon it was rather different. He was less cosmopolitan than Dick, and he insistently adhered to his first idea concerning what he would have felt had Hal been his sister.
Why she should have been specially interested did not occur to him. Dick, of course, actually was a sort of brother, being much more so in a sense than many real brothers, as far as personal interest and protection went.
When Has was first left an orphan she had been a great deal with him, at his own home, and they had always been special friends both then and since.
But Hermon was in no sense either a brother or a special friend. They had never done anything else but spar, however, good-naturedly; and Lorraine, in consequence, twitted him once or twice about looking grave over Hal’s doings.
And Hermon had laughed, and coloured a little, saying something about a feeling at the flat that they all had a sort of right in Hal, and he didn’t see what that brute, Crathie—a Liberal into the bargain—wanted to be taking her about for.
He even went so far as to say something to Hal herself about it; one day, when they were alone in Lorraine’s drawing-room, waiting for her to come in, Hal had just told him frankly she had played golf with Sir Edwin the previous day; and in a sudden burst of indignation Hermon exclaimed:
“I can’t think how you can be so friendly with the man. Surely you know what he is? He has about as much principle as my foot.”