“All right, old fellow. I have never said or thought that you were indifferent,” Michael answered, and his smile was frank and cordial. “But what is it that you want to consult me about? You are not thinking of getting married, are you?”
“I don’t know,” was the reply.
Michael looked at him keenly.
“That means, I should say, that you are,” he said.
In his turn, Bernard fixed his eyes on his cousin.
“What makes you think so? Have you heard any gossip about it?”
“I don’t know if you would call it gossip or not. I have heard that you seemed—well, a good deal struck by some one you met at Cannes. But you need not mind about it; it came round to me in the most innocent way, though I cannot tell you how.”
In point of fact, Michael’s informant was his old nurse, who had mentioned in a letter to him some allusions which Mrs Marmaduke Headfort had allowed herself to make, in her confidential talks with the housekeeper, to Mr Gresham’s admiration for her sister. But no comments, for or against, had been added by Mrs Shepton.
Bernard did not appear annoyed.
“Oh, at Cannes,” he repeated. “It is a nest of gossip about the English visitors, like all those places. And possibly,” he went on more slowly, “there was some little ground for it.”