The others, meanwhile, had gone down to the village of Andana. There in a little café, ordinarily shut during the winter, the hares and hounds browsed upon a common pasture. And curiously enough, while Bob and Dick ate with good appetite, their mood was hardly as joyous as it should have been; while those interesting young ladies, Miss Marjory and Miss Nellie Rider, wore already something of the staid demeanour of the married woman.
It was not until after lunch and much good Malvoisie that the young men drew aside to debate the situation in anxious whispers. Assuredly, as Bob admitted, they had "done it," and time alone and that far from amiable old lady, Mrs. Rider, could show them the way out.
In short, as Dick added savagely: "they were in a devil of a mess."
CHAPTER X
A SPECIALIST IS CONSULTED
The amiable discussion, begun in the interval after lunch, was continued at the Palace Hotel during that pleasant hour when tea is a memory and dinner an expectation.
The girls had gone up to their room by this time, hand in hand, and tremulous with the powers of suppressed narration. For them the supreme issue concerned an amiable lady who was quite in ignorance of the surprise prepared for her, and would certainly shed tears when the amatory bombshell exploded. For the youths it was another matter altogether. Conscience had begun to twit them with melancholy gibes upon their rashness. Or, as Bob put it tersely, a couple of wives and three hundred and ninety pounds a year between the pair of them. That was the bald truth. It had seemed otherwise in the woods when the sun shone, and the great mountains looked down kindly upon the lovers.
"What we want," said Dick resolutely, "is someone to advise us." He was a sentimental person, and given to idealism. "We ought to know how we stand before the thing goes any further. Marjory's a dear little girl, and I shall never marry anybody else. But that doesn't say I have the right to marry her on a hundred and ninety a year—you'll admit that, Bob?"
Bob admitted it, and ordered a "mixed Vermouth." They were sitting in the bar at the time, and could hear Bess Bethune scolding the doctor in the passage outside. Distantly, from the drawing-room came the strains of one of Schubert's nocturnes, played by a "half-back" from Harrow, who had some difficulty with the bass. The charming Swiss girl, who served them, did not understand much English, but they would have consulted her for two pins, so dreadful was the emergency.
"It's my opinion, we were just rushed into it," said Bob, taking up the conversation from an unobservable point, "I like Nellie better than any girl I ever saw, but I confess it's rather a knock to hear she's been engaged three times already. Suppose I were to meet one of the other fellows when we're married! He'd have the laugh of me, anyway."