“Your arm, Middy, when you are quite ready,” she said to him at last. Carnaby’s extraordinary unreadiness seemed to arise from his trying to smuggle some object up his sleeve. This proved, a few moments later, to be a bundle of lavender sticks tied with 237 violet ribbon that he had discovered in his bureau drawer. He laid it by Robinette’s plate with a whispered “My compliments.”
“What does your cousin want that bunch of lavender for, at the table?” Mrs. de Tracy enquired.
“She likes lavender anywhere, ma’am,” Carnaby said with a wink on the side not visible by his grandmother. “It’s a favourite of hers.”
Robinette could only be thankful that Lavendar was occupied in a sotto voce discussion of wine with Bates, and she was able to conceal the bundle of herbs before his eyes met hers, for the fury she felt against her precious young kinsman at that moment she could have expressed only by blows.
Dinner seemed interminably long. Robinette, for more reasons than one, was preoccupied; Lavendar made few remarks, and Carnaby was possessed by a spirit of perfectly fiendish mischief, saying and doing everything that could most exasperate his grandmother, 238 put her guests to the blush, and shock Miss Smeardon.
But at last Mrs. de Tracy rose from the table, and the ladies followed her from the room, leaving Lavendar to cope alone with Carnaby.
“My fair American cousin is more than usually lovely to-night, eh, Mr. Lavendar?” the boy said, with his laughable assumption of a man of the world.
“There, my young friend; that will do! you’re talking altogether too much,” said Lavendar, as he poured himself out a glass of wine and sat down by the open window to drink it. Carnaby, perhaps not unreasonably offended, lounged out of the room, and left the older man to his own meditations.
Robinette in the meantime went into the drawing room with her aunt, and they sat down together in the dim light while Miss Smeardon went upstairs to write a letter.
“Aunt de Tracy,” Robinette began, “I was calling on Mrs. Prettyman just after you 239 had been with her this afternoon, and do you know the dear old soul had taken the strangest idea into her head! She says you are going to ask her to leave the cottage.”