“Does he love you?”
“Laura thinks he does, but I’ve no reason to suppose so. We’ve always been friends, while Tom Beckett and I squabble and make up twice a week; but anyway, even if he doesn’t adore me in Tom’s silly way, Laura says I ought not to mind. She says it would be noble of me to help him to a splendid and prosperous career, and thinks I ought to remember how much my father wanted him for a son-in-law—you see he is awfully poor.”
At this coupling of fathers and poverty a sudden light blazed in upon my consciousness and I sat bolt upright among the sofa-pillows. How could I have guessed that the love-affairs of this rosy-cheeked dumpling, the casual acquaintance of a rest-cure, could have any connection with my own? If she hadn’t been the sort of person who confides at first sight we should have learned each other’s names at the beginning and been on guard. The truth is, I had thought of no one but Tom Beckett in her confessions; the personality of “the other man” had stolen into the chronicle so late in the day that I had taken no interest in him.
“Are you Amy Darling?” I asked her plump.
“Yes, but how mean of you to pump Blossom! I wanted to go on thinking of you as Zuleika and have you call me something imaginary and romantic.”
“I am Philippa Armstrong. Did you ever hear the name?”
“No, but it’s all right; it looks like you, and it’s nearly as pretty as Zenobia. Now if Tom Beckett had only chosen you and I could have obliged Laura by falling in love with—”
“Don’t mention the other man’s name!” I cried hastily; “it just comes to me that I may have met him.”
“Met Dick Morton?”
It was true then! Here was the girl whom Richard ought, for his worldly good, to marry, and she was not a woman at all, only an Angora kitten, and moreover a kitten in love with Tom Beckett!