Joan nodded. She suddenly felt unreasonably mean and despicable. She had declined to marry Hughie in all good faith, as she had a perfect right to do, for the very sufficient reason that she did not like him—or his way of putting things—well enough; and she had felt no particular compunction at the time in dealing the blow. But none of these reasons seemed any excuse for hurting Uncle Jimmy.
Since then, too, her feelings towards Hughie himself had altered to an extent which she was just beginning to realise. Of late she had found herself taking a quite peculiar interest in Hughie's movements. Why, she hardly knew. He paid her few attentions; he was habitually uncompromising in what he considered the execution of his duty; and he had made a shocking mess of her affairs. But—he was in trouble; people were down on him; and he had been her friend ever since she could remember.
Now Joan Gaymer, if she was nothing else, was loyal; and loyalty in a woman rather thrives on adversity than otherwise. And a woman's loyalty to a man who is her friend, if you endeavour to overstrain it or drive it into a corner, in nine cases out of ten will protect itself, Proteus-like, by turning into something entirely different, a something which is quite impervious to outward attack and can only be strained to breaking-point by one person—the man himself; and not always then, as countless undeserving husbands know. Joan's loyalty to Hughie was in some such process of transition. She thought about him a good deal, but she had never once faced the question of her ultimate relations with him. The modern maiden is not given to candid analysis of her own feelings towards members of the opposite sex,—she considers these exercises "Early Victorian," or "sentimental," or "effeminate"; and consequently Joan had never frankly asked herself what she really thought about Hughie Marrable. At times, say when she heard people speak ill of her deputy-guardian behind his back, she had been conscious that she was hot and angry; at others, when something occurred to bring home to her with special force the tribulations that Hughie was enduring, she had been conscious of a large and dim determination to "make it up to him," in some manner as yet undefined and at some time as yet unspecified. In short, like many a daughter of Eve before her, she had not known her own mind. She knew it now. Her heart smote her.
Suddenly Jimmy Marrable's voice broke in with the rather unexpected but not altogether unreasonable question:—
"Then if you aren't either engaged or married to Hughie, may I ask what the deuce you are doing in his house?"
"It isn't his house," replied Joan, recalling her wandering attention to the rather irascible figure by her side. "He has let it to the Leroys, and he and I are both staying here as guests just now."
"What on earth did the boy want to let the place for? Why couldn't you and the Leroys come and stay here as his guests?"
"I think," said Miss Gaymer delicately, "that Hughie is—rather hard up."
"Hard up? Stuff! He has eight hundred a year, and enough coming in from the estate to make it pay its own way without any expense to him. How much more does he want?"
"I don't think Hughie is a very good business man," said Joan.