“Thank the powers then!”—Hugh grasped at it. “I shall have it best if you’ll be so good as to tell me first—well,” he faltered, “what it is that, to my great disquiet, you’ve further alluded to; what it is that has occurred.”
Lady Sandgate took her time, but her good-nature and other sentiments pronounced. “Haven’t you at least guessed that she has fallen under her father’s extreme reprobation?”
“Yes, so much as that—that she must have greatly annoyed him—I have been supposing. But isn’t it by her having asked me to act for her? I mean about the Mantovano—which I have done.”
Lady Sandgate wondered. “You’ve ‘acted’?”
“It’s what I’ve come to tell her at last—and I’m all impatience.”
“I see, I see”—she had caught a clue. “He hated that—yes; but you haven’t really made out,” she put to him, “the other effect of your hour at Dedborough?” She recognised, however, while she spoke, that his divination had failed, and she didn’t trouble him to confess it. “Directly you had gone she ‘turned down’ Lord John. Declined, I mean, the offer of his hand in marriage.”
Hugh was clearly as much mystified as anything else. “He proposed there—?”
“He had spoken, that day, before—before your talk with Lord Theign, who had every confidence in her accepting him. But you came, Mr. Crimble, you went; and when her suitor reappeared, just after you had gone, for his answer—”
“She wouldn’t have him?” Hugh asked with a precipitation of interest.
But Lady Sandgate could humour almost any curiosity. “She wouldn’t look at him.”