Perhaps I have mixed him up somehow; but the meaning is clear."
A hollow-sounding and somewhat awful cough heralded the approach of Captain Paget, who entered the room at this juncture. If the Captain had prolonged his first airing, after six weeks' confinement to the house, until this late period of the afternoon, he would have committed an imprudence which might have cost him dearly. Happily, he had done nothing of the kind, but had re-entered the house unobserved, while Diana and Gustave were conversing close to the window, having preferred to leave his fly at the end of the street, rather than to incur the hazard of interrupting a critical tête-à-tête. The interval that had elapsed since his return had been spent by the Captain in his own bedchamber, and in the immediate neighbourhood of the folding-doors between that apartment and the parlour. What he had heard had been by no means satisfactory to him; and if a look could annihilate, Miss Paget might have perished beneath the Parthian glance which her father shot at her as he came towards the window, with a stereotyped smile upon his lips and unspeakable anger in his heart.
He had heard just enough of the conversation to know that Gustave had been rejected—Gustave, with Côtenoir and a handsome independence in the present, and the late John Haygarth's fortune in the future. Rejected by a penniless young woman, who at any moment might find herself without a roof to shelter her from the winds of heaven! Was ever folly, madness, wickedness supreme as this?
Horatio trembled with rage as he took his daughter's hand. She had the insolence to extend her hand for the customary salutation. The Captain's greeting was a grip that made her wince.
"Good-night, Miss Paget," said Gustave gravely, but with by no means the despondent tone of a hopeless lover; "I—well, I shall see you again, perhaps, before I go to Normandy. I doubt if I shall go to-morrow. I have my own reasons for staying—unreasonable reasons, perhaps, but I shall stay."
All this was said in a tone too low to reach Captain Paget's ear.
"Are you going to leave us, Lenoble?" he asked in a quavering voice. "You will not stop and let Di give you a cup of tea as usual?"
"Not to-night, Captain. Good-bye."
He wrung the old man's hand and departed. Captain Paget dropped heavily into a chair, and for some minutes there was silence. Diana was the first to speak.
"I am glad your doctor considered you well enough to go out for a drive, papa," she said.