But Hertha was sanguine and confident. She felt her own ground sure, and though personally willing enough to sink her own cause of complaint, she intended to make use of it for the sake of others.
That was to be a day—an evening rather—of explanations. The young people were amusing themselves in the billiard-room after dinner, and Miss Norreys, feeling a little tired, and having no special liking for billiards, was sitting quietly in the drawing-room, thinking over the family complications in which she found herself so unexpectedly involved, when the sound of some one entering the room made her look up. Somewhat to her astonishment, she saw that the new-comer was Lennox Maryon. Still more surprised did she feel when he came forward and drew a chair close to her own.
“Am I intruding?” he said; “you look nearly as startled as if I were the famous White Weeper herself.” His tone was bantering, but underneath Hertha perceived a touch of nervousness.
“I fancied you were absorbed in your game,” she said. “No, I did not fancy you were the White Weeper, though I confess I have been thinking about her. But she never comes inside the house?”
“She has never done so up to now,” said Lennox, “but Heaven knows what desperate steps she may not be driven to take if things go on as they are doing at present.”
His tone was so peculiar that Miss Norreys glanced at him questioningly.
“I hope devoutly she will wait till I have gone, then,” she said, half laughingly. “I have no wish at all to make her acquaintance. Are you joking, Mr Maryon, or are you at all, just a little, in earnest?”
“Yes and no,” he replied. “I am half joking out of the excess of my earnestness. Miss Norreys, I have something to tell you—a confession to make. Do you know, sometimes I have fancied you guessed, that I am very seriously, very thoroughly, in love, for the first time in my life?”
“With?” asked Hertha.
“My cousin Louise,” he said, quietly, though his sunburnt face deepened a little in colour.