‘You haven’t accounted for it yet,’ said the latter, sullenly.
‘Well, say she was in love with him.’
‘In love with my eye!’
Gilbert laughed again. ‘I give it up,’ said he. ‘It’s a conundrum I have often set myself, to no purpose. Michael is ten thousand times too good for her; but that’s nothing to the point. I don’t know why she took him.’
‘She ordered me off this afternoon, because he was coming to dinner,’ Otho said, in a voice of choking anger. ‘She told me my whole body wasn’t worth his little finger. She——’
‘You might be in love with her yourself,’ suggested Gilbert; and, indeed, a less astute observer might have been struck with the same idea.
‘I’ll be hanged if I am—insolent minx!’ retorted Otho, savagely. ‘No girl shall behave to me as she has done, with impunity. She shall pay for it. But, tell me, how long were they in making it up?’
‘Oh, not long; about six weeks. He was home for his holidays one summer, and we were talking together in front of the house. Miss Strangforth’s carriage, with her and Magdalen in it, drove by. The old lady saw us bowing, and stopped. I introduced Michael; he fell in love on the spot, then and there, over head and ears. Martha asked him to drive with them, and he drove. Drove deeper and deeper into love, I suppose; and—yes, it was just six weeks later, they were together at a picnic to Cauldron, and they returned engaged. My father has never got over it.’
‘How?’ asked Otho, in the same strangled voice.
‘He thought it so idiotic and imprudent. And so it was, and is. But Michael had become a man over the doing of it. They stuck to it, and they have stuck to it ever since. Some day, I suppose they will be married; but I don’t know when.’