“I want you to go and see her, and—oh, you know best then what to do. Don’t you think—I don’t know, but perhaps if you were to take her out for a walk or something.—Oh, good-bye, Mrs. Fellowes, and thanks, thanks, most awfully!”
Mrs. Fellowes watched him swing along down the drive, then pull up with a jerk to speak to her husband who was coming up, then swing off again out of sight.
“Poor old Dacre! But why didn’t he kiss her, the fool? I suppose he wasn’t ‘game’.”
She put some fresh tea into the pot and set her kettle on the little spirit lamp to boil up.
“Has Dacre been making you a declaration of unlawful love?” said the Rector when he came in. “He had precisely that air.”
“Worse than that a thousand times. His mother looked like crying, and was on the point of breaking out into sudden and condign maternal affection. Dacre fled incontinently. He is going to make a precipitate retreat to his regiment, and he came to plant me in the breach. The longer one lives, the less one thinks of the courage of your sex.”
“Want of experience makes cowards of us all. You couldn’t expect the fellow to face the unknown!”
“That’s it, you are all tarred with the same brush, you must have brutal sight to steady your nerves. Now, we——”
“You! You, my love, have intuition. Besides, there is a quotation that might apply, ‘fools rush in—’”
“Do drink your tea, and don’t try to be funny, I feel awful.”