"It is not true," broke forth Travice. "Who in the world has been telling you that falsehood?"
"Not true!" repeated Mrs. Arkell. "Why don't you say it is not true that I am talking to you—not true that this is Monday—not true that you are Travice Arkell? Upon my word! You are very polite, sir."
"Who told it you?" reiterated Travice.
"They told me. Mildred Arkell told me. I have been sitting there for the last hour, and we have been talking that and other affairs over. I can tell you what, Travice—it will be an excellent match for Lucy; a far superior one to anything she could have expected—and they seem to know it."
Even as she spoke, there shot a remembrance through Travice Arkell's heart, as an icebolt, of the night he had stood with Lucy in the chamber of her dying father, and her slighting words, in answer to his offer of a home: "I shall never have my home with you; nothing should induce me to it." She would not hear him; she told him he had no right so to speak to her. She had been singularly changed to him during the whole period of her father's illness; had shunned him by every means in her power; had been cold and distant when they were brought into contact. Before that, she was open and candid as the day. This fresh conduct had been altogether inexplicable to Travice, and he now asked himself whether it could have arisen from any engagement to marry Tom Palmer. If so, the change was in a degree accounted for; and it was certainly not impossible, if Tom Palmer had previously been wishing to woo her, that Mr. Peter Arkell, surprised by his dangerous illness, should have hurried matters to an engagement.
The more Travice Arkell reflected on this phase of probabilities, the more he became impressed with it: he grew to look upon it as a certainty; he felt that all chance for himself with Lucy was over. Could he blame her? As things were with him and his father, he saw no chance of his marrying her; and, in a worldly point of view, Lucy had done well—had done right. It's true he had never thought her worldly, and he had thought that she loved him; he believed that Tom Palmer had never been more to her than a wind that passes: but why should not Lucy have grown self-interested, as most other girls were? And to Travice it was pretty plain she had.
He grew to look upon it as a positive certainty; he believed, without a shadow of doubt, that it must be the fact: and how bitterly and resentfully he all at once hated Tom Palmer, that gentleman himself would have been surprised to find. It was only natural that Travice should feel it as a personal injury inflicted on himself—a slight, an insult; you all know, perhaps, what this feeling is: and in his temper he would not for some days go near Lucy. It was only when he heard the news that Mildred was returning to London, and would take her niece with her, that he came to his senses.
That same evening he took his way to the house. Mildred, it should be observed, was equally at cross-purposes. She hastened to speak to Lucy the day of Mrs. Arkell's visit, asking her if she had heard that Travice was engaged to Miss Fauntleroy; and Lucy answered after the manner of a reticent, self-possessed maiden, and made light of the thing, and was altogether a little hypocrite.
"Known that! O dear, yes! for some time," she said. "It would be a very good thing for Travice."
And so Mildred put aside any slight romance she had carved out for them, as wholly emanating from her imagination; but the sore feeling—that Lucy was despised by the mother, perhaps by the son—clung to her still.