“I’m sorry to hear it, Jarvis, deuced sorry, for that is the only woman I could ever have loved. Funny thing to tell you, isn’t it, but then you are in a way my confidential adviser in this strange, God-forsaken country, and I know you would never split on me, for if you did, Jarvis, I would break your blessed neck to a certainty.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the complaisant Jarvis, by way of acknowledging the other’s kind intentions.
“No, sir,” resumed Mr. Felix Johnstone with a burst of enthusiasm, “I’m not one of these men who have all their life long been trailing their hearts through the streets and highways for every thoughtless miss to trample on; my heart is a virgin field to be harvested only by one woman in this world, and if she won’t have it so, then, Jarvis, the grain has got to rot on the ground, that’s all. Now, Jarvis, there is something about the lady’s voice and look which stirs me like a trumpet. I sat opposite her at dinner last night, and the mistakes I made in consequence are something awful to contemplate. You see, Jarvis, she is not too young. She is, I imagine, about thirty——”
“She is thirty-two, sir,” respectfully corrected Jarvis, closing a Burke’s Peerage at which he had been glancing.
“Well, now, it strikes me, my friend,” retorted his master, with a flush on his brow, “that you are infernally precise about the Lady Evelyn Beeton’s age. May I take the liberty of inquiring, sir, how you came to know it exactly—just to a hair, as it were?”
There was fire in the master’s eye, but the well-trained valet answered with stoical calm. “Her ladyship’s age is in the Peerage; sir, I thought it might interest you to know.”
The answer was mollifying, but the little outburst called for a lull in the conversation, and Mr. Johnstone, now fully dressed, stood in silence looking out at the window, while the valet busied himself about his master’s effects with unruffled brow.
“She has such a high-bred and refined air, and such a soft and musical voice, and her eyes, what wonderful color and expression! And then the figure, so graceful, and yet so rounded. She ought to be a queen, and there I’m only a common Australian squatter and digger.”
Such was the murmuring monotone which rolled musically from the massive throat of Felix Johnstone by the window.
“Well—I’m—consumed,” he suddenly shouted, “if that jackanapes Howard hasn’t got into the pony chaise beside her! My hat, Jarvis, quick!”