“I don’t know where he got his style of conversation from,” she remarked, “but he is absolutely embarrassed when I present him to a woman. How do you account for it, Mr. Butterfield?”
“It is not,” I replied, “that he is deficient in physical bravery. I can only account for it on the supposition of instinct. He knows your propensities, Mrs. Loring, and would possibly die as he has lived, a blameless bachelor.”
“But it’s just the same with the married women,” she returned. “What is there to be afraid of in Alice Carmichael?”
“I decline to be invidious, Mrs. Loring,” I replied. “He gets along well enough with Millicent Dixon.”
“They are related,” she replied, somewhat inconclusively.
“I am afraid it is a non sequitur,” I answered. “Friendship generally varies inversely as the square of the distance of the relationship.”
“I wonder what we could do?” she said, half to herself. “Do you think Mrs. Gervase would do him any good?”
The wicked, wedded creature! Emily Gervase, a youthful widow, was Cicely Vicars’s sister. I drew myself up with dignity.
“Mrs. Loring,” I said, looking full at her, “I wonder that you do not tremble! What is it you would do? Has Col. Coke, of a score of Indian hill fights, the bearer of honourable scars of war and climate, not earned his peace? Would you, now that his body is broken on the outposts of an Empire for your protection, harrow the boyish soul within it? No, madam. On me, if you will, you may exercise your arts; but if you once submit that venerable head to the machinations of Emily Gervase—I expose you.”
“Exercise arts on you!” she retorted. “You’re too fond of it; and I shall be—nice—to the Colonel, in spite of you, Mr. Butterfield.”