“You say so,” said the invalid, “to the man who can perhaps best understand you in the whole world, being the unluckiest man in it, I should think; a failure in everything beside you, who are a success in everything. You must let me congratulate you, as one of your wife’s earliest friends. I am just sufficiently older than she is to have held her in my arms as an infant.”
“For heaven’s sake, none of that!” Evelyn exclaimed under her breath, with a flash of overpowering offence. He eyed her with a smile in those two brilliant eyes.
“To have petted her as a little girl, to have—admired her as a woman: nobody can know so well as I what a prize you have got, Mr. Rowland.”
James was a little surprised, and slightly, faintly disturbed. “I hope I know that,” he said, “and my great good fortune.”
“And I hope,” said Evelyn, “that I am not considered likely to enjoy all this, listening to those mutual compliments. I, for my part, am fully alive to my own good fortune. James, I think we must go on. We have to be at Madeline’s.”
“Madeline,” said Saumarez with a laugh, “is always Mrs. Rowland’s excuse. She is constantly going to Madeline’s if one tries to detain her for a moment. But you must wait till I tell you how kind she has been to my children. It cannot but do a young girl good to be in Mrs. Rowland’s society; and I am doubly grateful for my motherless Rose. I hear you’ve got Lord Clydesdale’s place at Rosmore.”
Mr. Rowland did not like to hear it called Lord Clydesdale’s place. “Until the moment when we can get him to sell it to us,” he said.
“Ah, will he sell? That’s a different matter. A rich tenant paying a good rent, that’s one thing—but Clydesdale won’t sell. I hope you are not calculating upon that.”
“We shall see,” said Rowland, not well pleased.
“Yes, we shall see. And must you really go—to Madeline? Lay me at her ladyship’s feet. I will go and give her ladyship my opinion of—things in general, one day very soon.”