"I SUPPOSE IT WAS AN HOUR."
"Poor dear James is the worthiest soul, but he has no more brains than a pin—the small kind of pin that you get in change for a farthing!"
"James always seemed to me a good footman."
"Rupert! He is an admirable footman. I haven't a word to say against him in that capacity. He does his duties with the beautiful regularity of an automatic machine. But move James from his own dear little beaten track, and he is lost, hopelessly, irrevocably lost!"
"What beaten track has he left? and why is he rousing your ladyship's wrath?"
Lady Cicely Redesdale, lying back in the cosiest chair of her cosy boudoir, swung her pretty foot to and fro, and glanced up at her tall cousin with one of her gay little laughs. Rupert Mernside, the son of her mother's sister, had always been to her more of elder brother than cousin, and from their earliest youth there had existed between them a frank camaraderie which had never degenerated into flirtation, or drifted into any sentimental relationship. Cicely was in the habit of saying that Rupert was the person of all others from whom she would not only ask, but take, advice; because his judgment was so sound and he possessed a really well-balanced mind. This opinion of him had been endorsed by her late husband, who had only qualified it with one limitation.
"Rupert's got as sound and balanced a mind as any man could wish for, but once let the right woman get hold of him, and she will twist him round her little finger."
Those words of her husband recurred to Cicely now, as she lifted her eyes from their contemplation of her own dainty shoes and looked up into Rupert's rugged face.
"I should rather like to see a woman twist you round her little finger," she said irrelevantly.
"A woman—me? What on earth have a woman and I got to do with James's delinquencies?"