Radowitz controlled himself at once.
“I won’t say any more,” he said in a low voice, breathing deep—“I won’t say any more.” But a minute afterwards he looked up again, his brow contracting—“Only, for God’s sake, don’t marry him!”
“Don’t be afraid,” said Constance. “I shall never marry him!”
He looked at her piteously. “Only—if you care for him—what then? You are not to be unhappy!—you are to be the happiest person in the world. If you did care for him—I should have to see some good in him—and that would be awful. It is not because he did me an injury, you understand. The other two are my friends—they will be always my friends. But there is something in Falloden’s soul that I hate—that I would like to fight—till either he drops or I. It is the same sort of feeling I have towards those who have killed my country.”
He lay frowning, his blue eyes sombrely fixed and strained.
“But now”—he drew himself sharply together—“you must talk of something else, and I will be quite quiet. Tell me where you have been—what you have seen—the theatre—the opera—everything!”
She did her best, seeing already the anxious face of the nurse in the window behind. And as she got up to go, she said, “I shall come again very soon. And when you go to Yorkshire, I shall see you perhaps every day.”
He looked up in astonishment and delight, and she explained that at Scarfedale Manor, her aunts’ old house, she would be only two or three miles from the high moorland vicarage whither he was soon to be moved.
“That will do more for me than doctors!” said Radowitz with decision. Yet almost before she had reached the window opening on the balcony, his pain, mental and physical, had clutched him again. He did not look up as she waved farewell; and Sorell hurried her away.
Thenceforward she saw him almost every day, to Lady Langmoor’s astonishment. Sorell too, and his relation to Connie, puzzled her greatly. Connie assured her with smiles that she was not in love with the handsome young don, and never thought of flirting with him. “He was mother’s friend, Aunt Sophia,” she would say, as though that settled the matter entirely. But Lady Langmoor could not see that it settled it at all. Mr. Sorell could not be much over thirty—the best time of all for falling in love. And here was Connie going to pictures with him, and the British Museum, and to visit the poor fellow in the nursing home. It was true that the aunt could never detect the smallest sign of love-making between them. And Connie was always putting forward that Mr. Sorell taught her Greek. As if that kind of thing wasn’t one of the best and oldest gambits in the great game of matrimony! Lady Langmoor would have felt it her solemn duty to snub the young man had it been at all possible. But it was really not possible to snub any one possessed of such a courteous self-forgetting dignity. And he came of a good Anglo-Irish family too. Lady Langmoor had soon discovered that she knew some of his relations, and placed him socially to a T. But, of course, any notion of his marrying Connie, with her money, her rank, and her good looks, would be simply ridiculous, so ridiculous that Lady Langmoor soon ceased to think about it, accepted his visits, and began to like him on her own account.