‘Just so,’ agreed the auctioneer cheerfully. ‘Well, Mrs. Fiander, I shall lose by it, as I say, but I will try and arrange matters for you in this way. Under the circumstances, ma’am, I grudge no time or trouble spent in your service. I am always thought to be a lady’s man—my late poor wife used to say that my consideration for ladies injured the business; but, as I used to tell her, a man has a heart or else he has n’t. If he has a heart—if he has more feelings than his neighbours, he is n’t to blame for it. “Let the business go, my dear,” I ’d say, “but don’t ask me to be hard on a woman.”’
It had been whispered among the gossips of Branston that during the lifetime of the late Mrs. Wilson her lord had been wont to correct her occasionally with a boot-jack, but these rumours had not reached Rosalie’s ears; and even if they had she would probably have disbelieved them. Nevertheless, she did not quite like the manner in which the gallant auctioneer leered at her, nor his unnecessarily warm pressure of her hand on saying good-bye.
She drove homewards with a mixture of feelings. The inauguration of her new plan seemed to involve a considerable amount of risk, not to say loss; she felt conscious of the fact that she owed her very partial success more to the persuasion of her beauty than to faith in her prospects as a woman of business; yet there was, after all, satisfaction in thinking that she had carried her point.
CHAPTER VII
He that will not love must be
My scholar, and learn this of me:
There be in love as many fears
As the summer’s corn has ears.
* * *
Would’st thou know, besides all these,
How hard a woman ’t is to please,
How cross, how sullen, and how soon
She shifts and changes like the moon.Herrick.
It was with some trepidation that Rosalie awaited Isaac’s visit on the Sunday following that long and eventful week. The good fellow was, indeed, so overcome when he found himself seated once more in the familiar chair, with the vacant place opposite to him, that she had not courage to make a confession which would, she knew, distress and annoy him—a confession which would have to be made, nevertheless.
Her own eyes filled as she saw Isaac unaffectedly wiping away his tears with his great red-and-yellow handkerchief, and for some moments no word was spoken between them. She filled his pipe and lit it for him, but he suffered it to rest idly between his fingers, and made no attempt to sip at the tumbler of spirits and water which she placed at his elbow.
‘Let’s talk of him,’ she murmured softly, at last, bending forward. ‘Tell me about when you knew him first.’