"I am not going to desert you, for I never had the faintest intention of joining you," answered Leonard bluntly; "whether my wife and her friends made idiots of themselves by playing nursery games in her drawing-room, or by skipping about a windy height on the edge of the sea, is their own affair. I can take my pleasure elsewhere."
"Yes; but you take your pleasure very sadly, as somebody said of English people generally," urged Mopsy, whose only knowledge of polite literature was derived from the classical quotations and allusions in the Daily Telegraph; "you will be all alone, for Jack and little Monty have promised to come with us."
"I gave them perfect freedom of choice. They may like that kind of thing. I don't."
Against so firm a resolve argument would have been vain. Mopsy gave a little sigh, and went on with her breakfast. She was really sorry for Leonard, who had been a kind and useful friend to Jack for the last six years—who had been indeed the backbone of Jack's resources, without which that gentleman's pecuniary position would have collapsed into hopeless limpness. She was quite sharp-sighted enough to see that the present aspect of affairs was obnoxious to Mr. Tregonell—that he was savagely jealous, yet dared not remonstrate with his wife.
"I should have thought he was just the last man to put up with anything of that kind," she said to Dopsy, in their bedchamber confidences; "I mean her carrying on with the Baron."
"You needn't explain yourself," retorted Dopsy, "it's visible to the naked eye. If you or I were to carry on like that in another woman's house we should get turned out; but Mrs. Tregonell is in her own house, and so long as her husband doesn't see fit to complain—"
"But when will he see fit? He stands by and watches his wife's open flirtation with the Baron, and lets her go on from bad to worse. He must see that her very nature is changed since last year, and yet he makes no attempt to alter her conduct. He is an absolute worm."
"Even the worm will turn at last. You may depend he will," said Dopsy sententiously.
This was last night's conversation, and now in the bright fresh October morning, with a delicious coolness in the clear air, a balmy warmth in the sunshine, Dopsy and Mopsy were smiling at their hostess, for whose kindness they could not help feeling deeply grateful, "whatever they might think of her conduct. They recognized a divided duty—loyalty to Leonard as their brother's patron, and the friend who had first introduced them to this land of Beulah—gratitude to Mrs. Tregonell, without whose good graces they could not long have made their abode here.
"You are not going with us?" asked Christabel, carelessly scanning Leonard's shooting gear, as she rose from the table and drew on her long mousquetaire gloves.