Archie smiled at this somewhat lame conclusion to her warning.
“You may trust me, dear Hebe,” he said, as he pressed her hand in farewell, and then he was gone.
But Hebe sat thinking deeply for some time after he had left her.
“What would Josephine say?” she thought to herself. “What a romantic goose she would think me. But I have never seen Archie quite like this before. And if such a thing came to pass—if I could be sure he is in earnest for once—it would be delightful in many ways. But”—and here a new view of the subject struck her—“I don’t believe Blanche would accept him,” she thought. “She is proud, rightly proud, and she has seen so little of him. She is not a girl to marry a man without thoroughly caring for him. No, I don’t believe she would accept him. But if he is in earnest now, he has certainly never been so before.”
Mr Dunstan returned to Alderwood that same evening, having already written to Norman Milward with some suggestion of the proposed plan, and promising to see him in London early the following week.
“It would have been perfectly impossible to refuse Hebe,” he thought to himself, as he was sitting alone in the small room where dinner had been served for him, “but it does seem dreadfully unlucky. I don’t see my way at all, and yet can I go away for an indefinite time and leave things as they are? I must trust to chance, I suppose. I must call there to-morrow, for I promised Hebe to give her message. Beyond that, I see nothing.”
Mr Dunstan’s visit had not made any great impression on the members of the little household in the High Street, with the exception possibly of Miss Halliday and Herty.
An unexpected and rather important order coming at a dull season had made the milliner and her young assistants unusually busy, and it was not without a feeling almost amounting to annoyance that Blanche found herself called away from the workroom the day after Archies return from London, to join her mother in the drawing-room.
“Do you want me particularly, mamma?” she said as she went in. “I am so busy just now. I could come in half an hour or so.”
As she spoke she suddenly became aware that her mother was not alone. Mr Dunstan was standing by the window.