“But,” cried Millicent, “of course something was done. They could never leave Mr. Meredith unprotected.”
“Yes,” answered Jocelyn quietly, “Mr. Oscard went up and rescued him. My brother heard yesterday that the relief had been effected.”
Millicent smiled again in her light-hearted way.
“That is all right,” she said. “What a good thing we did not know! Just think, auntie dear, what a lot of anxiety we have been spared!”
“In the height of the season, too!” said Jocelyn.
“Ye—es,” replied Millicent, rather doubtfully.
Lady Cantourne was puzzled. There was something going on which she did not understand. Within the sound of the pleasant conversation there was the cliquetis of the foil; behind the polite smile there was the gleam of steel. She was rather relieved to turn at this moment and see Sir John Meredith entering the room with his usual courtly bow. He always entered her drawing-room like that. Ah! that little secret of a mutual respect. Some people who are young now will wish, before they have grown old, that they had known it.
He shook hands with Lady Cantourne and with Millicent. Then he stood with a deferential half-bow, waiting for the introduction to the girl who was young enough to be his daughter—almost to be his granddaughter. There was something pathetic and yet proud in this old man's uncompromising adherence to the lessons of his youth.
“Sir John Meredith—Miss Gordon.”
The beginning—the thin end of the wedge, as the homely saying has it—the end which we introduce almost every day of our lives, little suspecting to what it may broaden out.