“It is time for you to come in, my pet,” she said, descending one of the flights of wooden steps, and making her way with difficulty over the shingle to the sands. “If you see my sister, Mr. Stewart, would you kindly ask her to bring Leonard back? I do not like him to be out in the heat of the day. I do not think it is good for children to be on the shore when the sun has so much power.”
“Now, they have had a quarrel,” decided Mr. Stewart, glancing along the Parade, where he descried Mrs. Aymescourt Croft wending her way homewards, solitary and stately, haughty and defiant. “I should like immensely to know what it is all about. There is something very decidedly amiss between my amiable niece and Mrs. Dudley.”
“Your wife and our pretty friend do not seem able to stable their horses comfortably together,” he said to Mr. Croft, when Heather, who declined all offers both of companionship and of assistance, had borne Lally—bitterly protesting against such injustice—away. “How is it, do you think?”
“My wife is jealous,” was the prompt reply.
“Does she fancy you are smitten?”
“No; but she thinks you are,” Mr. Croft answered. “She considers that Mrs. Dudley stands too good a chance of being favourably remembered in your will, for much cordial feeling to exist amongst us.”
“And why the devil should I leave Mrs. Dudley sixpence?” asked Mr. Stewart. “What is she to me that I should bequeath anything to her, more than to the first stranger I meet on the Marina?”
“My charming wife,” replied Mr. Croft, in that daring tone of off-hand recklessness which, as Mr. Black had remarked, was one of his peculiarities, “my charming wife, giving you credit for a vein of romance, and a depth of sensibility which, I confess, I never noticed in your character, imagines that the revival of old associations, the thoughts of ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ in fact, which the sight of Mrs. Dudley must naturally have awakened, may produce an undesirable effect upon the ultimate disposal of your property. For my part, I am delighted at the opportunity now afforded of assuring you I would much rather you left your money to Mrs. Dudley than to my wife.”
“What are you talking about, Douglas?” asked his uncle. From the drawing-room window of the house they occupied Mrs. Croft could, with the aid of an opera-glass, see, not merely that Mr. Stewart stopped as he put this question, but that he looked excited and perplexed. “What is Mrs. Douglas to me, I ask again, that I should leave her sixpence? She is a sweet woman, and pretty, and devoted to her blockhead of a husband, but I should not care if I never saw her again. Does your wife think I am in love with her? Does she imagine I am so nearly doting as all that comes to?”
Douglas Croft looked steadily in his uncle’s face for a moment, and then burst out laughing.