"I know there has been—some kind of flirtation," answered Mr. Montagu, luxuriously buried in a large armchair, with his legs hanging over the arm, "and I suppose it's the man who's to blame. Of course it always is the man."
"Did you ever hear such a sneaking evasion?" demanded Jack. "Not a year to live forsooth. Why if he can't make her his wife he is bound as a gentleman to make her his widow."
"He has plenty of coin, hasn't he?" asked Montagu. "Your sister has never gone for me—and I'm dreadfully soft under such treatment. When I think of the number of girls I've proposed to, and how gracefully I've always backed out of it afterwards, I really wonder at my own audacity. I never refuse to marry the lady—pas si bête: 'I adore you, and we'll be married to-morrow if you like,' I say. 'But you'll have to live with your papa and mamma for the first ten years. Perhaps by that time I might be able to take second-floor lodgings in Bloomsbury, and we could begin housekeeping.'"
"You're a privileged pauper," said Captain Vandeleur; "Mr. Hamleigh is quite another kind of individual—and I say that he has behaved in a dastardly manner to my elder sister. Everybody in this house thought that he was in love with her."
"You have told us so several times," answered Montagu, coolly, "and we're bound to believe you, don't you know."
"I should have thought you'd have had too much spunk to see an old friend's sister jilted in such a barefaced way, Tregonell," said Jack Vandeleur, who had drunk just enough to make him quarrelsome.
"You don't mean to say that I'm accountable for his actions, do you?" retorted Leonard. "That's rather a large order."
"I mean to say that you asked him here—and you puffed him off as a great catch—and half turned poor little Dop's head by your talk about him. If you knew what an arrant flirt he was you oughtn't to have brought him inside your doors."
"Perhaps I didn't know anything about it," answered Leonard, with his most exasperating air.
"Then I can only say that if half I've heard is true you ought to have known all about it."