“I am very sorry,” I said, my colour rising, “but it is not anybody’s fault but my own, if fault there is. I wrote to ask Mr Payne to come. It is entirely a matter of business—I would like to tell you all about it, but I don’t think I can. It depends on a letter I have had from father, and I am expecting another to-morrow morning, which I hope I shall be able to show you at least part of, in explanation of what I have done.”
But Lady Bretton, good as she was, was not perfect. She was irritated at the whole episode, and therefore not quite reasonable.
“I can scarcely think,” she said, “that your father can have realised what he was putting upon you. If so, he should have written to me direct. Why, the very servants will gossip about it, and no wonder, as of course, from what you say, I am not to make a third at the interview.”
It was all I could do not to begin to cry, but I controlled myself as a new and, I thought, happy idea struck me.
“I have been very thoughtless, I’m afraid,” I said penitently, “but if you understood the whole thing, and before long I hope I may be able to tell you about it, I don’t think you would be vexed with me.” I stopped short, forgetting that I had not introduced my new project.
“What is to be done?” said my godmother, still rather coldly.
“Oh!” I exclaimed, “I was just going to tell you what I think I can do. I will write to Clar— to the younger Mr Payne, I mean, and ask him to beg his father to come with him. That would put it all right, would it not?”
“It would certainly give the interview its proper character,” she allowed, “that of a purely business one. But in taking all this upon you, my dear child,” and I was glad to hear her more natural tone again, “are you quite sure that you know what you are about?”
“Yes,” I replied, decidedly, and I meant it. “Sooner or later,” I said to myself, “Mr Payne must be told everything. And if father’s letter is what I am sure it must be, ‘sooner’ will be pretty surely better than ‘later.’”
My dreams, I well remember, were not of a very tranquil nature that night. I felt distressed at having managed for the first time, during my stay with her, to annoy my kind godmother, and I felt miserable and mortified at the bare shadow of a suggestion that my writing to Clarence Payne, asking him to call, as I had done, was, to say the least, unconventional, if not unladylike. For remember, I am writing of fully thirty or forty years ago, when the position of young girls of our class was very different from what it now is—though I cannot quite allow that in every way the alteration seems to me for the better.