“He hasn’t taken you down to see it?”
“Not yet. No. It’s a private engagement. His father doesn’t know. He is waiting for a chance to tell him.”
“Wouldn’t the father be glad for his heir to marry?”
“He wouldn’t be glad for him to marry me! But the estate is entailed, so Frank can do as he likes. But the old man is ill, always having asthma and heart attacks, so it wouldn’t do to upset him, and of course till he knows, Frank can’t tell any other members of the family.”
Claire, standing by the fireplace, gave a vague assent, and was glad that her face was hidden from view. For Cecil’s sake she intensely wanted to believe in Major Carew and his account of his own position, but instinctively she doubted, instinctively she feared. She remembered the look of the man’s face as he had stood facing her across the little room, and her distrust deepened. He did not look straight; he did not look true. Probably the old father had a good reason for keeping him short of money. If he were really in love with Cecil, and determined to marry her, that was so much to his credit; but Claire hated the idea of that secrecy, marvelled that Cecil could submit a second time to so humiliating a position. Poor Cecil! how awful it would be if she were again deceived! A protective impulse stirred in Claire’s heart. “She shan’t be, if I can help it!” cried the inner voice. At that moment she vowed herself to the service of Mary Rhodes.
“A big country house in Surrey! That’s the ideal residence of the heroine of fiction. It does sound romantic, Cecil! I should love to think of you as the mistress of a house like that. Come and sit by the fire, and let us talk. It’s so exciting to talk of love affairs instead of exercises and exams... Let’s pretend we are just two happy, ordinary girls, with no form-rooms looming ahead, and that one of us is just engaged, and telling the other ‘all about it.’ Now begin! Begin at the beginning. How did you meet him first?”
But there a difficulty arose, for Cecil grew suddenly red, and stumbled over her words.
“Oh—well—I— We met! It was an accident—quite an accident—rather a romantic accident. I was coming home one Sunday evening a year ago. I had been to church in my best clothes, and when I was halfway here the skies opened, and the rain descended. Such rain! A deluge! Dancing up from the pavement, streaming along the gutters. I hadn’t an umbrella, of course—just my luck!—and I’d had my hat done up that very week. I tore it off, and wrapped it in the tails of my coat, and just as that critical moment Frank passed, saw me doing it, and stopped. Then he asked if I would allow him to shelter me home beneath his umbrella. Well! I’m not the girl to allow men to speak to me in the street, but at that moment, in that deluge, when he’d just seen me take off my hat, could a gentleman do less than offer to shelter me? Would it have been sane to refuse?”
“No; I don’t think it would. I should certainly have said yes, too. That’s the sort of thing that would have been called chivalry in olden times. It’s chivalry now. He was quite right to offer. It would have been horrible if he had passed by and left you to be drenched.”
Cecil brightened with relief.