By this time Miss Raynsworth had begun to breathe more freely. No further contretemps had as yet occurred. She had been most careful to keep out of the way of the guests in the house, more especially the two Greshams, for, after hearing from Evelyn of her conversation on the night of her arrival with the elder of the cousins, she could no longer deceive herself as to his identity with the handsome, silent man whose personality had somehow impressed her at Dorriford, and she was even more afraid of coming across him than of again meeting Solomon’s master.
To poor Solomon himself she had more than once been obliged to be positively cruel, for whenever she caught sight of his tan-coloured person she was seized with terror lest her other travelling companion should be near at hand. In those days it is to be feared that the dachshund’s belief in the stability of woman’s friendship received some severe shocks. One afternoon in particular he happened to run against Miss Raynsworth in one of the back passages not far from Mrs Shepton’s room, and the girl, thinking herself for once safe from dangerous observation, stooped down and patted him affectionately. No sooner had she done so than she bitterly regretted it, for coming towards her, but a few paces off, she descried his master’s familiar figure. The dog by this time was in a state of frantic delight; at all costs she must get rid of him.
“Down, down,” she said, in a cruelly repressive tone, which poor Solomon would have understood even without the stern “Come here, sir,” from Michael Gresham which followed; and as she hurried along the passage she could not resist glancing back over her shoulder in pity for her four-footed admirer. Mr Gresham was not to be seen—what had become of him?—but Solomon was sitting on the mat outside the housekeeper’s room, looking profoundly miserable and feeling doubly deserted—by his master as well as by his friend. For Michael had shut the door in the dog’s face.
“Poor old boy,” thought Philippa. “I wonder why he has settled himself there.”
For she knew that Mrs Shepton was not specially addicted to dogs. She liked them, she said, in “their proper place;” in other words, when they were entirely out of her sight and with no opportunity of jumping on sofas, eating rugs, or going to sleep on her best eiderdown quilts.
Chapter Ten.
“Merle-in-the-Wold.”
Miss Raynsworth would have been considerably surprised had she known the reason of Solomon’s encampment in his present quarters.
“I have left my dog outside,” his master was at that moment saying to the housekeeper, “so I hope you’ll be pleased with me, ‘Mrs Shepton, ma’am!’” using the rather absurd title which had clung to his old friend since the days when she had been his nurse.
Mrs Shepton smiled indulgently. “Now, Master Michael, what would any one think to hear you still speaking to me like that?” she said, forgetting that her own way of addressing the young man was now equally inappropriate, “and I don’t like you to think that I would be unkind to a poor dumb creature, especially one you are fond of. Dogs are all very well in their proper place! But when it comes to finding one in a young gentleman’s bed with its head on the pillow and the clothes tucked under its chin, as I have seen you have Toby many and many a time in the old days at Allerton—well, no, I can’t say but what that was going too far.”
Michael Gresham laughed.