“Well, anything else must be a minor evil,” said the Earl, with an accent of relief. “Whichever of the rest of them it is, Davie, I tell you at the outset that I wash my hands of the business. My sisters rendered the first twenty-five years of my life a torment upon earth. They bullied me out of all peace in life as a youngster; they made my rotten marriage for me; they took my money and then blackened my character in reward; they——”
“Oh, I know all those gags by heart,” interposed Mosscrop. “They’re really very decent bodies, those sisters of yours; if they had a fault, it was in believing that they could make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. But it’s not about them at all that I was speaking. The point is, Archie, that I have made the acquaintance of Mr. Laban Skinner and his extremely attractive daughter.”
The Earl took in this intelligence with ponderous slowness. He sipped at his glass in silence, and then stared for a little at his friend. “Well, what is there so alarming about that?” he demanded at last, roughening his voice in puzzled annoyance. “They’re respectable people, aren’t they? And what the deuce are you driving at, anyway?”
“Ah, if you take that tone with me, old man, I pull out of the affair at once.”
Drumpipes scowled. “What affair? How do you know there is any affair! And what business have you got being in it, if there is an affair? You’re over-officious, my friend. You take too much on yourself.”
Mosscrop laughed with tantalising enjoyment in his eyes. “Confess that you think of making a Countess of the lady.”
“Well, and what if I do?” the Earl retorted. “Damn it all, man, I haven’t to ask your leave, have I? And, come now, I put it to you straight, have you ever seen a finer woman in your life?”
David lifted his brows judicially, and held his head to one side. “Oh, I’m not saying she’s amiss—in externals,” he admitted.
“Man, she’s wonderful! Just wonderful!” cried the other. “Did you mind her walk? It is as if she’d never been outside a palace in her life. And the face, the eyes, the colour, the figure—what Queen in Europe can match them? Man, since I first laid eyes on her, I’ve not been myself at all. The thought of her bewitches me. I hardly know what I’m doing. I’ve been to-day to my tailor’s, and I gave him orders that fair took his breath away. The most expensive clothes, and even furs, I ordered with as light a heart as if it were a matter of sixpences. The man knows me from childhood, and he gazed at me as if I was clean daft. He was shaking his head to himself when I came away. Oh, I’m quite a different person, I assure you. I literally hurl money about me, nowadays.”
“You must indeed be in love,” said Moss-crop. “The father—he gives one the notion of a man of wealth.”