“Finish your sentence, you tantalising boy.”
“Your caretaker, then,” he concluded defiantly.
“Delicious,” she clapped her hands softly. “I thought you were going to say ‘proprietor.’”
“It is you who are the proprietor of the caretaker, isn’t it?”
“The new cadet is worthy his commission,” she pronounced with mock gravity.
“It is a great honour, especially since I am not one of the family.”
He never forgot this in her presence. It was as if an overscrupulous remembrance of hard days forced him to disclaim kinship with anything so finely feminine as Constantia Wyatt; as if he found no right of way from his own world of concrete fact into that delicate gracious world of illusions in which he placed her. Such barriers did not exist for her, however, and thence it came that it was to Constantia that Christopher spoke most easily of his relationship to the Aston family.
She put aside his disclaimer now, almost indignantly.
“You belong to Aymer. How can you say you do not belong to us, when you have been so good for him?”
His main claim on them all lay in that, that he was and had been good for the idolised Aymer Aston. He recognised it as she spoke and was content, for the 174 proud generosity of his nature was built on a humility that had no underprops of petty pride.