"Oh!" she said, putting one hand unexpectedly on Jan Cuxson's arm and digging her stick fiercely into the ground, as the man in the garden half rose from his chair and sank back with a frown.
"Oh!" she repeated.
"Tired, dear?"
Neither of them noticed the little endearing word which had slipped out so naturally, but Leonie's face was wan and her eyes were dead as she dragged herself down the last few yards, while her aunt fluttered down to the gate to meet them, with her mind and skirts in a whirl.
"Jan Cuxson!" she exclaimed, offering a limp hand, and "How very nice," she continued, lying quite successfully. "I should have known you anywhere. Do come in and have tea!"
And in the same breath, and with that strange cruel cunning of the shallow mind, which is the abortive twin of decent feminine intuition, she leapt at the difficulty she saw threatening, and tried to dispel it.
"Let me introduce you to Sir Walter Hickle, my niece's fiance."
Sir Walter ambled forward with outstretched hand as Cuxson, nodding curtly, bent to pick up Leonie's stick, which had clattered to the floor.
A malicious gleam shone in the elder man's little eyes as he looked at the splendid young fellow who had seemed, physically anyway, so fit a match for Leonie as they tramped down the hill together; and though there was no sign of his inward perplexity and repulsion in Jan Cuxson's face as his eyes swept the obese figure of the notorious old knight, his jaw took a sudden, almost ugly, outward thrust with the birth of a mighty resolution.
Leonie walked to the gate with him when he took his departure, having refused tea from a certain undefined feeling that he could not even sit in the same room as the man whom he intended to do out of the odd trick.