“Charming, ma!” chorused Laura. “We’ll see about making the arrangements at once, in order to prevent you from changing your mind.”
The incumbent’s wife need not, however, have been under any anxiety on that score: the campaigner knew very well when she had made a bargain, and she was not going to back out of it.
“I must send the darling boy Mortimer to school, however. It will be so sad parting with him, but it must be done. It would never do to have him here, would it?”
And she looked inquiringly at her son-in-law.
Pringle had sundry experiences of the darling boy’s tractable disposition, and was rather disinclined in being so intimately associated with the young hopeful, so he combatted the point.
“You’re quite right, Lady Inskip. He’d better be sent to school; not that I’d have any objections to his coming here, but then—”
“Yes,” sighed the campaigner, “I suppose he must go; it would be too much to ask.”
“Oh! have him here, ma. Don’t send him to school, poor little fellow! Herbert won’t mind, will you?” struck in Laura.
The incumbent was again doomed to defeat. He could refuse his young wife nothing when she was so judiciously “backed up” by the campaigner.
“Oh! certainly not, Lady Inskip. Have him here by all means.”