The Tenderfoot had a desire to bite off his tongue. He felt himself floundering deeper and deeper into a morass. A sickening sensation crept upon him that he had put himself at the mercy of this crafty old Jesuit.
“Now, sir, don’t go taking an unfair advantage of anything I may have told you.” The sheer impotence of such a speech served only to emphasize his tragic folly.
By now there was a sinister light in the eyes of his Grace. The unlucky Tenderfoot could hardly stifle a groan of vexation. Only a born idiot would have taken pains to put such a weapon in the hands of the enemy!
Overcome by a sudden hopeless anger the young man rose from his chair and fled the room. His course was not stayed until he had passed headlong down the white marble staircase and out of doors into a golden morning of July. For the next two hours he ranged the Park grass. It was the only means he had of working off an irritation and self-disgust that were almost unbearable.
III
Youth and inexperience might have put a weapon into the hand of his Grace, yet when the clock on the chimneypiece struck twelve he was in a very evil mood. The task before him was not at all to his taste; and the more he considered it the less he liked the part he had now to play.
From various sources he had heard enough of the girl to stimulate his curiosity. Apart from a lover’s hyperbole, of which he took no account whatever, impartial observers, viewing her from afar, had commented upon her; moreover, there was the extremely piquant nature of her antecedents. She was a niece of the faithful Sanderson, she was also the daughter of a police constable.
The Duke was apt to plume himself that his instinct for diplomacy amounted to second nature. But, he ruefully reflected, his powers in this direction were likely to be tested to the full. His task seemed to bristle with difficulties. Bridport House was no place for a young woman of this kind, but it was not going to be an easy matter to tell her that in just so many words. The best he had to hope for was that she would prove a person of common sense.
When at five minutes past the hour Miss Lawrence was announced, for one reason or another, the Duke was in a state of inconvenient curiosity. And as if the mere circumstances of the case did not themselves suffice, a chain of odd and queer reflections chose to assail his mind at the very moment of her appearance.
It was terribly inconvenient for his Grace to rise from his chair, mainly for the reason that one swollen, snowbooted foot reclined at ease on another. But with an effort that wrung him with pain he contrived to stand up.