She looked up in Arthur’s face with eager, sparkling eyes, and this time she had no need to recall his attention. His eyes were sparkling too, his colour rose, his voice even seemed to her to shake a little with suppressed excitement as he replied to her:
“Alys, you are the best and nicest girl in the world. It was just like you, you dear good child, to think of such a thing, and I thank you—I always shall thank you for it with all my heart. I felt sure,” he went on, more quietly—“I felt sure I should find I might count upon you, and now I know it. I have a great deal to tell you, Alys, and I—”
But at this moment Mr Cheviott’s voice was heard.
“Alys,” he was saying, “are you not going to play a little? What mischief are Arthur and you concocting over there?”
He came towards them as he spoke. Captain Beverley had laid his hand on Alys’s in his eagerness, his face was flushed, his whole manner and air might easily have been mistaken for those of an accepted or would-be lover, and the start with which he threw himself back on his own chair as his cousin approached, increased the apparent awkwardness of the situation. But Alys, though her cheeks were rosier, her eyes brighter than their wont, answered quietly and without confusion:
“We are not concocting mischief, Laurence,” she said; “we are too wise and sensible for anything of the kind, as you might know by this time. We’ll have another talk about our plans to-morrow, Arthur. Come and sing something now to please aunt, as she made an effort to do you honour by coming down to dinner.”
And the tête-à-tête between the cousins was not renewed that evening, nor, as Alys had proposed, “to-morrow,” for Arthur did not make his appearance at Miss Winstanley’s the next day at all. Mr Cheviott saw him and went with him to the architect’s, and brought back word that he was over head and ears in model pig-sties and shippons.
“And in farm-houses too,” he said. “I think it very foolish of him to lay out money on doing much to the house itself. It is quite good enough as it is for the sort of bailiff he should get.”
“Oh, then, he does not intend to live at Hathercourt Edge himself,” remarked Miss Winstanley.
Mr Cheviott turned upon her rather sharply.