No; certainly the young man was not much occupied with "Fanny and Rachel!" He spoke with ill-concealed impatience, indeed, of both his sisters and his mother. If his people would get in the way of everything he wanted to do, they needn't wonder if he cut up rough at home. For the present it was settled that he should at any rate go back to Oxford till the end of the summer term—Aldous heartily pitying the unfortunate dons who might have to do with him—but after that he entirely declined to be bound. He swore he would not be tied at home like a girl; he must and would see the world. This in itself, from a lad who had been accustomed to regard his home as the centre of all delights, and had on two occasions stoutly refused to go with his family to Rome, lest he should miss the best month for his father's trout-stream, was sufficiently surprising.
However, of late some tardy light had been dawning upon Aldous! The night after Frank's arrival at the Court Betty Macdonald came down to spend a few weeks with Miss Raeburn, being for the moment that lady's particular pet and protégée. Frank, whose sulkiness during the twenty-four hours before she appeared had been the despair of both his host and hostess, brightened up spasmodically when he heard she was expected, and went fishing with one of the keepers, on the morning before her arrival, with a fair imitation of his usual spirits. But somehow, since that first evening, though Betty had chattered, and danced, and frolicked her best, though her little figure running up and down the big house gave a new zest to life in it, Frank's manners had gone from bad to worse. And at last Aldous, who had not as yet seen the two much together, and was never an observant man in such matters, had begun to have an inkling. Was it possible that the boy was in love, and with Betty? He sounded Miss Raeburn; found that she did not rise to his suggestion at all—was, in fact, annoyed by it—and with the usual stupidity of the clever man failed to draw any reasonable inference from the queerness of his aunt's looks and sighs.
As to the little minx herself, she was inscrutable. She teased them all in turns, Frank, perhaps, less than the others. Aldous, as usual, found her a delightful companion. She would walk all over the estate with him in the most mannish garments and boots conceivable, which only made her childish grace more feminine and more provocative than ever. She took an interest in all his tenants; she dived into all his affairs; she insisted on copying his letters. And meanwhile, on either side were Miss Raeburn, visibly recovering day by day her old cheeriness and bustle, and Frank—Frank, who ate nothing, or nothing commensurate to his bulk, and, if possible, said less.
Aldous had begun to feel that the situation must be probed somehow, and had devised this walk, indeed, with some vague intention of plying remonstrances and enquiries. He had an old affection for the boy, which Lady Leven had reckoned upon.
The first difficulty, of course, was to make him talk at all. Aldous tried various sporting "gambits" with very small success. At last, by good-luck, the boy rose to something like animation in describing an encounter he had had the week before with a piebald weasel in the course of a morning's ferreting.
"All at once we saw the creature's head poke out of the hole—pure white, with a brown patch on it. When it saw us, back it scooted!—and we sent in another ferret after the one that was there already. My goodness! there was a shindy down in the earth—you could hear them rolling and kicking like anything. We had our guns ready,—but all of a sudden everything stopped—not a sound or a sign of anything! We threw down our guns and dug away like blazes. Presently we came on the two ferrets gorging away at a dead rabbit,—nasty little beasts!—that accounted for them; but where on earth was the weasel? I really began to think we had imagined the creature, when, whish! came a flash of white lightning, and out the thing bolted—pure white with a splash of brown—its winter coat, of course. I shot at it, but it was no go. If I'd only put a bag over the hole, and not been an idiot, I should have caught it."
The boy swung along, busily ruminating for a minute or two, and forgetting his trouble.
"I've seen one something like it before," he went on—"ages ago, when I was a little chap, and Harry Wharton and I were out rabbiting. By the way—" he stopped short—"do you see that that fellow's come back?"
"I saw the paragraph in the Times this morning," said Aldous, drily.
"And I've got a letter from Fanny this morning, to say that he and Lady Selina are to be married in July, and that she's going about making a martyr and a saint of him, talking of the 'persecution' he's had to put up with, and the vulgar fellows who couldn't appreciate him, and generally making an ass of herself. Oh! he won't ask any of us to his wedding—trust him. It is a rum business. You know Willie Ffolliot—that queer dark fellow—that used to be in the 10th Hussars—did all those wild things in the Soudan?"