“If it isn’t she, it’ll be some one else,” said Nina in a depressed tone. “Godfrey Auriol said it would be impossible—absolutely unheard of—for us to live alone as Lettice wanted. Oh, Arthur, I wish you weren’t going away;” and poor Nina, allowing herself for once the indulgence of giving way to her own feelings regardless of those of others, threw her arms round her boy-brother’s neck and burst into tears. And though Arthur did his best to console her, it was, though not precisely from the same cause, with sad enough hearts that the brother and sister lay down to sleep that night.
There had been much to try them since the day that Godfrey Auriol, with nothing but good will in his heart to his young relatives, had left his smoke-dried chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, where frost and fog were still having it their own way, and came “over the sea” to the sunny brilliant south, intent on advising and assisting the sad little group. He had found things very different from what he expected, and he had gone back again depressed and dispirited, doubtful, though he had manfully stood out for victory, if he had gone the right way about it, more perplexed and disgusted with himself than he ever remembered to have been before. For he was in every sense of the word a very successful man. Starting in life with little but a good old name and a clear and well-stocked head, he was already far on the way to competency. He was made much of in whatever society he entered; he was used to being looked up to and having his opinion and advice asked. He had not married, had scarcely ever been in love—never to a fatal extent—and had acquired a habit of thinking that women were not to be too seriously considered one way or the other. “Take them the right way,” and there was never any trouble to be feared. And now when it came to the test he had ignominiously failed. For though Lettice had been obliged to give in, it had been, as she took care to tell him, only to the extent to which she was obliged to do so—not a jot further. And he had an uncomfortable, an exaggerated idea that he had been rough—what the French call “brutal”—to her.
“To her, my own cousin, and an orphan, too, whom I was prepared to care for like a sister—yes, like a sister, that first night when she seemed so sweet and gentle. And to think of the things we have said to each other since!” thought poor Godfrey, during his long solitary journey back again to whence he had come.
If Lettice could have seen into his heart I think she would have been moved to regret. And she had been very unreasonable. The “intentions” of which she had spoken no relation or guardian in the world could have approved of.
“We do not wish to return to England,” she told Godfrey calmly. “I want to spend the summer, while it is too hot here, in travelling about, and next winter we shall come back here again.”
“And under whose care?” Mr Auriol asked quietly.
“Mine,” said Lettice, rearing her head. “Of course we have old Bertha, who will never leave us. But I am quite old enough to take care of my brothers and sisters.”
“You may think so. I don’t,” he replied drily. “Besides, it is not altogether a question of age. If you were married—”
“I shall never marry.”
“Indeed!” Mr Auriol observed with the utmost politeness. “But that, excuse me, is a matter for your private consideration, in no way interfering with what I was saying. If, for supposition’s sake, you, or let us say Nina, who is still younger,”—and he turned to Nina with a smile which somehow made the colour rise in her cheeks—“if Nina were married to a reliable sort of man, there would be nothing against your all living together if you chose.”