“Go if you like, Mary. Please don’t be long. I want Lord Kelmscourt to know you better, to be able to tell his sister, who is a dear friend of mine, what each of my girls is like; he has known Jane and Florimel, when he brought them here in the car, but you he has seen but little,” Mrs. Garden answered her.
Lord Kelmscourt had laughed when Mary made her request. Now he arose, and crossed the room to hold the door open for the three young girls as they passed through it.
“I fancy that I know Miss Mary better than she imagines that I do,” he said, his pleasant blue eyes so full of mischievous kindness that Mary’s dropped before their gaze. “I think that she would be a generous foe,” he added, and Mary knew that her ruse, which her mother had accepted without criticism, was transparent to her guest.
“I’m not going, Mary,” Jane announced, after the three, with Win, were safely outside the door. “As if I didn’t know you asked Mrs. Moulton to call us up, and tell us to come over, so he’d have a chance to talk to madrina! It’s all right; we’ve got to get out of the way, and let him steal her, but I’m going right up to my room. I don’t want to go anywhere to talk and behave.”
“Nor I,” Florimel echoed. “Jane and I will go upstairs; they’ll never know. When you come back, come in at the side door and whistle up the back stairs, Win. We’ll hear and come down, as if we’d been with you, but I couldn’t see a soul while I knew my little toy-mother was getting stolen, just as Jane says. My gracious! People lock up their spoons!” Florimel added with bitter disgust.
“Do you mean to imply that this Englishman is spoony?” Win suggested, but Florimel could not smile. She stalked upstairs, shaking her head, its black braid of hair appropriate to the mourning stamped on the handsome little face below it.
Mary and Win went on their way, therefore, without the others.
“I’m glad your hands aren’t scarred, Mary,” Win said, taking one of them to draw it through his arm. “I’ve always been fond of your capable, shapely hands, my dear. That mark on the right one isn’t going to show. There’s romance in the air, Molly darling! Do you know I think that Audrey can see me with her opera glasses screwed down to a shorter range than she could before the Garden of Dreams came off? Sometimes I’m tempted to imagine that Audrey begins to think of me as a possible rival to Wellesley! Do you?”
Mary laughed and squeezed Win’s arm with the beautiful hand which he was glad to know was unmarred. “To tell the truth, Win dearest, I haven’t noticed these symptoms of better sight in Audrey. But none of us were one bit anxious about her being blind. I’d like to know why she wouldn’t care for you, you splendid old Winchester-brother-uncle! I’ve no doubt you’re right,” she declared.
“I’m not going to try to get in the way of her college,” said Win, thanking Mary with a pressure on the hand in his elbow. “But I’d like to be visible to her, and to know I stood some chance when she came home again.”