"But wouldn't she be a nuisance?"
"No. I like having young people about me, and besides, I've a reason----"
Again, as though fearful of betraying herself, Julia checked speech. But the next day and the next, work finished, her mind reverted to its plan.
"We might invite young Wilberforce, too," she suggested when Ronnie came down on the Saturday. "That would make you four for tennis."
"And two for match-making," retorted Ronnie, entirely unsuspicious of his mother's real motive.
CHAPTER XXVII
1
Jimmy's two-seater was suffering from one of its usual breakdowns. That red-haired young man, instructing his porter to put his bag into a first-class smoker, had no idea of the coil woven about his destiny. Ronnie he had not seen for some weeks; Julia's letter to his firm requesting that "Mr. Wilberforce, Jr., should, if possible, come down and see me" conveyed an invitation to stay the Friday night, but no hint of Mollie's presence at Daffadillies.
Nevertheless, as he watched Victoria Station slide past the lowered windows, the solicitor's thoughts visualized a girl whose letters from Clyst Fullerford showed all too plainly that she meant to insist, despite her love for him, on Aliette's divorce preceding her own marriage. Jimmy had written that girl only a week since, begging her--"for the absolutely last time of asking"--to be reasonable. But the veiled threat brought only the inevitable reply, "You mustn't ask me that. It wouldn't be fair to Alie."
He had apologized for his veiled threat; but the reply to it still rankled. "Really," thought the junior partner in Wilberforce, Wilberforce & Cartwright, "it's getting a bit too thick. I've told her over and over again that I don't care what her sister does. As far as I am concerned, she can go on living with Cavendish till the cows come home. But when it comes to that dear little idiot insisting that I should arrange my prospective sister-in-law's divorce before my own marriage--well, it's enough to try the temper of the lord chief!"