“Wait till you see it,” he said. “It’s splendidly managed, even though for the greater part of the year he lives in a corner of it shut up with his books. No,” warming to enthusiasm as he went on, “it is simply perfection to stay at. Besides his huge wealth, which he knows how to use, he is far cleverer than you would think in some ways. I don’t mean his learning, but socially speaking, as the string-puller, so to say. He knows how to get the right people together, and you’re always sure of somebody interesting there; and he very often has my sister-in-law—his sister, you know—to act hostess, and she is quite charming, though almost plain.”
Frances had grown interested by this time, and forgetful for the moment of her own preoccupation.
“You put Mr Morion in rather a new light to me,” she said. “Somehow I have always thought of him, if indeed I have thought of him at all, as a sort of bookworm and recluse, with no sympathy or geniality about him—indifferent to the rest of the world. That is why I have sometimes almost—” She stopped short.
“Do go on,” said Horace, with the persuasive charm of manner, sometimes quite irresistible, about him. “You know surely by this time that you can trust me perfectly?”
“It was more,” she replied, “that I felt ashamed of what I was going to say. It was that I have almost grudged him his wealth, thinking him one of those people that did not know how really to use it—for others.”
“There you wrong him,” said Horace quickly: “he is by no means selfish, or even self-absorbed—as I have good cause to know,” he added, in a lower voice, as if thinking aloud. “His manner is certainly against him,” he went on; “he gives one the impression of being much more indifferent—cynical—than he really is. In point of fact I know few men, if any, that would have been what he is in the same position; quite unspoilt by coming into all that money and property—Witham-Meldon is really princely—so young as he did.”
Frances was one of those people who instinctively respond to expressions of generous appreciation or admiration of others. There was real pleasure in her face as she turned to Horace, quite unrestrainedly now, for as the conversation went on its increasing: interest had tended more and more to make her for get her perplexing thoughts of the preceding night.
“You and he must be really friends,” she said. “He must be quite different from what I thought.”
Horace smiled, but without speaking. Then half nervously he began to flick at some withered leaves at the side of the path where they were walking, with the stick he held. And almost instantaneously Frances again became self-conscious, or conscious, rather, that her companion was feeling so.
She was right: the young man’s first words confirmed her suspicion.