They parted now, she clinging to him tenderly before going away, and whispering in his ear that 99, Cowley Street, Lambeth, was where she would be a week from Sunday next, and that then she would be all his, and, meanwhile, would write often. They parted, she going up the avenue towards where the house stood, and he standing looking after her, feeling his chin and, with a contemptuous smile, drawing down the corners of his mouth.
[CHAPTER III.]
"A COUNTRY CLOD."
It was now almost dark--yet not quite so, it being the period when the days are longest--and for some little time the Beau stood gazing after the retreating figure of his captured heiress. Then he turned slowly and began to retrace his steps to the Hautbois, where he intended to snatch a few hours' rest ere the up coach, which left the "Globe" at Portsmouth at five o'clock in the morning, should pass.
Perhaps never had Algernon Bufton been in a more agreeable frame of mind than he was at this present time. Everything was, he told himself, very well with him. A ruined spendthrift; a man who, seven years ago, had inherited a substantial fortune and, in the passage of those seven years, had managed to squander it; the chance had come to him of winning this girl, whom, in his mind, he considered to be little better than a fool.
He had thought so at first when he made her acquaintance at a public ball at Tunbridge, he having gone there heiress hunting and with a list in his pocket of all the young ladies who were known to be either the possessors of large fortunes or the future inheritors thereof; and he still thought her a fool after this evening's interview. That she should have fallen violently in love with him did not of course stamp her as one, since, in spite of his unfortunate chin, he deemed himself not only attractive, but irresistible. Yet a fool she undoubtedly was to throw herself away on a man about whom she had made no inquiries (as he knew she could not have made), and to be willing to marry him in the surreptitious, or, as he termed it, "hole in the corner," manner that she was about to do.
"If I were a scoundrel," he mused to himself with extreme complacency, "who was pursuing the girl with some other object than that of obtaining possession of her fortune, how I might hoodwink her! Granger, if kept sober till midday, could play the parson sufficiently well to throw dust in her eyes. But not in such a case as this should it be done. No. No! my beauteous Ariadne. Not in such a case as this. You shall be tied up devilish tight, so tight that never shall you escape your bonds with Algernon Bufton; so fast that my demise alone shall cancel them. You are not one of the pretty helpless fools whom villains deceive.
"A fine property, too," he mused, casting a dark eye around, "a fine property. The trees alone would sell for much if cut down. Yet--yet--we must not come to that. An avenue gives ever an imposing---- Hist! What is this? Some country clown, by the way he sings to himself. Perhaps a rival."
Whereon, true to himself, Beau Bufton assumed a haughty, indifferent air as he strode along, and drew down his lips into the well-known Bufton sneer, as he considered it.
The person of whom he spoke, and who was quite visible in the evening gloaming, was now drawing near, and Bufton decided that he had guessed aright when he imagined him to be a country clown. A country squire perhaps; but no more.