"And does she like you?" she said, with pride. She could not see Fred any longer, but her mind's eye saw him—handsome, gay, irresistible. Of course she adored him.
"Sometimes I think she does," said Fred, "and sometimes I'm afraid she doesn't." And he expounded at great length, garnished with abundant detail, his various meetings with her; how on one occasion she had hardly looked at him; on another she had spoken to him of Browning—that was the time when he had bought Browning's works; on a third, how there had been another man there—a curate—a beast, but thinking a lot of himself; on a fourth she had said that balls—the Mudbury ball where he had danced with her—were an innocent form of recreation, etc., etc.
Janet drank in every word. It reminded her, she said, of "her and George." Indeed, there were many salient points of resemblance between the two courtships. The brother and sister sat long together hand in hand in the soft summer night. Only when she got up at last did the thought of the missing I O U return to Janet.
"O Fred!" she said, as they walked towards the house, "supposing after all your I O U turns up? How dreadful! What would happen?"
"It won't turn up," said Fred, with a laugh.
When Janet was alone in her room she remembered again, with pained bewilderment, that Fred had actually believed that she had destroyed that missing paper. It did not distress her that Monkey Brand evidently believed the same. She would, of course, tell him that he was mistaken. But Fred! He ought to have known better. Her thoughts returned speedily to her brother's future. He would settle down now, and be a good man, and marry the eldest Miss Ford. She felt happier about him than she had done since Cuckoo's death. Her constant prayer, that he might repent and lead a new life, had evidently been heard.
As she closed her eyes she said to herself, "I daresay Fred and Venetia will be married the same day as George and me."
Monkey Brand appeared at Ivy Cottage a few days later. Janet was in the field with Fred, taking the setter puppies for a run, when the "Trefusis Arms" dog-cart from Mudbury drove up, and Nemesis, in the shape of Monkey Brand, got slowly down from it, wrong leg first. Even in the extreme heat Monkey Brand wore a high hat and a long buttoned-up frock-coat and varnished boots. As he came towards them in the sunshine, there was a rigid, controlled desolation in his yellow lined face, which made Janet feel suddenly ashamed of her happiness in her own love.
"I had better go," said Fred hurriedly. "I don't want to be uncivil to the brute in my own house."