“What do you want me to do?”
“Go to Mr. Grant and tell him ... or stop! I’ll write a note for you to take to him. You’ll find him, I suppose, at the Lockharts’ house in Hammersmith. Give the letter only into his own hands. Will you do that for me?”
“I wish I could die for you, Perdita,” was his reply, with a lack of outward emphasis that made it impressive.
She glanced sidelong at him and drew in her breath with a half sigh. He was an honest fellow and he loved her truly. Perhaps she was sorry, for a moment, that she could not love him. For it is the pleasure of fate to turn the affairs of lovers topsy-turvey; and even so redoubtable a Marquise as Perdita might one day find herself discomfited in somewhat the same way that Tom was now. However, fate is fate and cannot be defeated.
She followed up her sigh with a smile. “I love myself too well,” she said, “to send you on any deadly errand. Shall I write the note now?”
“Yes, if you’ll be so kind. My mare needs exercise and I shall like to ride over to Hammersmith this evening. ’Tis not six o’clock yet.”
So Perdita sat down and wrote her letter and gave it to Tom, and also gave him her hand to kiss. But he said, “Not yet, if you please; I couldn’t kiss it the right way.”
Perdita said nothing. But after her rejected suitor had departed with her letter stowed away in the breast of his coat, she looked in her glass and murmured, with a queer little laugh:
“Is that a blush I see?”
Tom marched home with a solemn and dignified air, and, having caused his mare to be saddled, he mounted her and set out toward Hammersmith, on the errand which, neither to him nor to Perdita, seemed to involve any deadly peril.