"Your love is singularly vindictive," said his vehement young opponent, her cheeks hot and her eyes bright. "No good was ever yet done to a man by proclaiming his faults right and left. I should like you much better, Mr. Ruskinstone, if you said, candidly, I don't like my cousin, and I have never forgiven him for thrashing me at Rugby, and playing football better than I did."
Eusebius winced at this little touch up of his bygone years, but he smiled a benign, superior, pitying smile. "Such petitesses, I thank Heaven, are utterly beneath me, and I should have fancied Miss Gordon was too generous to suppose them. God forbid that I should envy poor Vaughan his dazzling qualities. I sorrow over him as a relative and a precious human soul, but as a minister of our holy Church I neither can, nor will, countenance his gross violations of all her divinest laws." With which peroration the Warden, with a sigh, took up a work on "The Early English Piscini and Aspersoria," and became immersed therein.
"Poor Mr. Vaughan!" cried Nina, impatiently. "Probably he is too wise to concern himself about what people buzz in his absence, or else he need be cased in mail to avoid being stung to death with the musquito bites of scandal."
Gordon came down on her with his heavy artillery. "Silence, Nina! you do not know what you are defending. I fear that no slander can darken Mr. Vaughan's character more than he merits."
"A gambler—a roué—a lover of married woman, of dancing-girls," murmured Eusebius, in an aside, meant, like those on the stage, to tell killingly with the audience.
Nina flushed as scarlet as the camellias in her bouquet, and put up her head with a haughty gesture. "Here comes the subject of your vituperation, Mr. Ruskinstone, so you can repeat your denunciations, and favor him with a sermon in person—unless, indeed, the secular recollections of Rugby intimidate the religious arm."
I fear something as irreverent as "Little devil!" rose to the Warden's pious lips as he flashed a fierce glance at her from his pale-blue eyes, for he loved not her, but the splendid dot which the banker was sure to pay down if his son-in-law were to his taste. He caught his cousin's glance as he came into the salons, and in the superb scorn gleaming in Ernest's dark eyes, Eusebius saw that they were not merely enemies, but—rivals: a Warden with Church principles, all the cardinal virtues, strict morality, and money; and a Lion with Paris principles (if any), great fascinations, debts, entanglements, and an empty purse. Which will win, with Nina for the cup and Gordon for the umpire?