He really believed that Hilary had the bad taste to dislike that young lady, and he was certainly not ill-pleased by such a manifestation of feeling on the part of his handsome friend. Not for an instant did the suspicion cross his mind that two persons present were listening with intense, even breathless, interest to his careless words.
“I must go up to town the first thing to-morrow morning,” he said, presently, “to find out how Hilary is. Of course he is enormously strong, but for that very reason he is the more likely to overestimate his powers of recuperation. Early in the autumn he will be going out to settle in Canada on a farm which has been left to him, and I believe he proposes to spend some years there, so that we shall not long have a chance of being together. He is a capital business man, as long-headed and keen-sighted over a bargain as most Yorkshiremen are, and I have no doubt that he will carry out his expressed determination, and make the property pay.”
“By which time, probably, he will modify his views on the marriage state sufficiently to permit of his mating with some honest, robust person in his own rank of life, who will rear for him a squarely built and solid brood of Anglo-Canadian olive-branches,” remarked Sir Philip, still with his eyes furtively watching his daughter.
“Here is to your friend the farmer’s health and prosperity,” he added, sipping his brown sherry with the air of a connoisseur. “A man in that position is very wise in deferring marriage as long as possible. In the case of the lower middle-class, too often ‘a young man married is a man that’s marred.’ ”
“One must always take Anne Hathaway into consideration when one recalls Shakespeare’s reflections on the marriage state,” observed Lord Carthew. “A man who at eighteen marries a woman of six-and-twenty, beneath him in rank, and of questionable character, is hardly likely to entertain a high opinion of wedded life. Speaking for myself, I have always looked forward with out-of-date eagerness and interest to the day when I should bring home my bride. And I am most anxious to see my father and mother on the subject at the present time.”
His eyes rested lovingly upon Stella, but as he had not directly used her name, she could hardly utter a disclaimer. The blood rushed to her cheeks as she realized that she was being placed in a wrong position altogether. Lord Carthew treated her, spoke to her, and alluded to her, as though there were some compact between them; and yet, as she had promised nothing, there was nothing to retract. If she were to assure him again privately, after dinner, that she did not love him, that would but be repeating what she had said to him before; he had said that he did not expect her love, and was glad to be content as yet with merely her liking. How could she say:
“This morning I hardly knew that I had fallen in love with your friend at first sight, and I believed he disliked me extremely; also, the prospect of an escape from the Chase, and from my father’s tyranny, for both my mother and myself, seemed too good to be missed. But after you had spoken to me, and I had more than half encouraged you, your friend kissed me, and instantly I knew that I loved him with all my heart, as he loved me, and that marriage with you was absolutely impossible.”
Clearly she could not make such a statement, especially in the face of what Lord Carthew himself had said of Hilary’s rooted aversion against marriage, together with the significant fact of his hasty departure from the Chase, without so much as telling her in so many words that he loved her.
Stella was intensely miserable that evening. Every now and then she told herself, in passionate self-reproach, that hers was the fault, that Hilary had not loved her, had not meant to kiss her. It was merely, as he himself had said, like a part of his dream; it was that little gesture of hers toward him which had hastened that one quick embrace of which he had already so plainly repented. She almost cried aloud in humiliation at the thought, and the blushes coursed over her cheeks under her lowered lashes so swiftly and unaccountably that poor Lord Carthew was to be pardoned if he began to lay the dear delight to his soul that she was thinking of him. Of what else, indeed, could she be thinking? he asked himself, as he noted her evident abstraction, her strange reserve, and those sudden changes of color.
When Lady Cranstoun and Stella retired to the drawing-room, the former, settling herself upon her sofa, motioned to the young girl to draw her low stool up beside her, and tenderly stroked her hair.