Again a pause, and then: “I am glad,” said Miss Armytage, “to think that Una has a friend, a trustworthy friend, upon whom she can depend. She is so incapable of depending upon herself. All her life there has been some one at hand to guide her and screen her from unpleasantness until she has remained just a sweet, dear child to be taken by the hand in every dark lane of life.”
“But she has you, Miss Armytage.”
“Me?” Miss Armytage spoke deprecatingly. “I don’t think I am a very able or experienced guide. Besides, even such as I am, she may not have me very long now. I had letters from home this morning. Father is not very well, and mother writes that he misses me. I am thinking of returning soon.”
“But—but you have only just come!”
She brightened and laughed at the dismay in his voice. “Indeed, I have been here six weeks.” She looked out over the shimmering moonlit waters of the Tagus and the shadowy, ghostly ships of the British fleet that rode at anchor there, and her eyes were wistful. Her fingers, with that little gesture peculiar to her in moments of constraint, were again entwining themselves in her rope of pearls. “Yes,” she said almost musingly, “I think I must be going soon.”
He was dismayed. He realised that the moment for action had come. His heart was sounding the charge within him. And then that cursed rope of pearls, emblem of the wealth and luxury in which she had been nurtured, stood like an impassable abattis across his path.
“You—you will be glad to go, of course?” he suggested.
“Hardly that. It has been very pleasant here.” She sighed.
“We shall miss you very much,” he said gloomily. “The house at Monsanto will not be the same when you are gone. Una will be lost and desolate without you.”
“It occurs to me sometimes,” she said slowly, “that the people about Una think too much of Una and too little of themselves.”