Mr Cheviott hesitated.
“I am not, after all, perfectly certain that I shall go down to Romary quite so soon as I said. Part—in fact, the chief part—of my business was with Arthur, and if he stays in town a few days too, we may all go down to Romary together, as you wish.”
“That’s very nice of you, Laurence. I really think my training is beginning to do you good. Aunt, of course, will be delighted to see Arthur, but I will go and tell her about it now.”
She was leaving the room when her brother called her back. “Remember,” he said, “I haven’t promised,” but Alys laughed and shook her head, and ran off.
“I can manage Arthur,” she thought, “if it depends on him. But I am sure there is something Laurence has not told me that has annoyed him lately, though he looks happier to-night—I wonder what it is all about.”
Captain Beverley was a great favourite with Miss Winstanley, whose affection for her nephew—her half-brother’s son—Laurence Cheviott, was considerably tempered with awe. But with Arthur she always felt at ease.
“It is not that I mind being laughed at, now and then,” she would confide to Alys, pathetically, “but with Laurence I really never feel sure if he is laughing at me or not. Of course he is never wanting in real respect, and he is the best of nephews in every way, but I can’t deny that I am frightened of him, and, however you laugh at me, my dear, you can’t laugh me out of it. I always have been afraid of Laurence, ever since he was a baby, I believe. He has had such a dreadfully superior sort of way of looking at one, and saying, ‘What for does you do that?’”
“What a dreadful baby he must have been! I always tell him he was never snubbed as much as would have been for his good,” Alys would reply, upon which her aunt would observe, with a sigh, that it was “far too late in the day to think of anything of the kind now.”
Her spirits rose greatly when she heard that Arthur was coming to dinner.
“I really think I feel well enough to dine with you, after all,” she said to Alys. “It would certainly seem more hospitable, as Arthur is coming, and I don’t like to get the character of exaggerating my ailments,” and Alys agreed with her that if she were “well wrapped up,” the exertion of going down two flights of stairs to the dining-room was not likely to do her any harm.