“The most abandoned coquette in London.” Then seeing Lionel’s eyebrows go up, he added quickly, “I’m not crabbin’ her. Personally, I believe she’s as cold as Greenland’s icy mountains. Her vitality is mental, not physical. She’s had a dozen affairs. Comes out of ’em cool as a cucumber. I predict that she’ll make a big marriage—take on a Serene Highness. Pots of money! Go easy with her, old lad. Hide your feelings.”
Lionel laughed.
“I shall have to, Tom.”
“Eh?”
“I mean that I particularly dislike that sort of girl. But father cracks her up no end. For his sake, not mine, I shall hide my feelings.”
“If she whistles, you’ll come to heel.”
Lionel returned from this visit slightly depressed, and unable to analyse his own incohate emotions and sensibilities. His father had treated him so generously that he was positively tingling with impatience to make some return. He was in the mood, in fine, to lead a nice girl, with a bit o’ money, to the altar, but not such a “dasher” as Lady Margot. Being a modest youth, he jumped to the conclusion that she would not dash at him. If she did——! Well, in that unlikely contingency he could retreat, tactically.
The sight of Joyce, whom he met by accident in the village, heartened him up. He reproached her for faithlessness in not coming to the river upon his first day at home; but she replied simply that her father had despatched her on some errand to a house at the farther end of the parish. He murmured a faint protest—
“Parson’s unpaid curate, are you?”
“Father pays me, as—as your mother pays you.”