“I cannot say that you do much credit to the Princes’ cuisine,” says Sir George, taking stock of his niece more closely than he has yet done, having, in fact, ordered her to move the skilfully interposed tea-kettle, or her own chair, so as to enable him to do so. “You must have lost quite a stone in weight since I left home.”
“Don’t you know, sir, that there is nothing that the young woman of to-day dreads so much as putting on an ounce of superfluous flesh?” asks Rupert.
Lavinia is thankful to him for his timely interposition; yet it frightens her. Why should he come to her help? Can he have any intuition or knowledge of her sore need of it? and by what creepy coincidence has he used the exact phrase employed by Binning yesterday in connection with himself: “An ounce of superfluous flesh”? There is in reality nothing to excite wonder in the employment of so common a turn of expression; but to a soul so guilty the most ordinary sentence seems heavy with ominous significance, and she hurries out her own less tactful repartee with needless treading on the heels of her cousin’s.
“And how many stone have you lost?”
Sir George looks bored. “Thank you, my dear; but we need not bandy civilities on the subject of our infirmities.” Then with a quick and determined return to amiability, “Come, let us hear all about poor Binning? He went yesterday?”
“No; this morning.”
“Poor chap! I should like to have shaken his hand again before he went. I tried to persuade this slug of a fellow to run down and see the last of him, but he pretended that he was afraid to leave me. I must tell you that his filial piety has become a most appalling nuisance, and that he is like nothing in the world but an old hen with one duckling.”
“I proudly own to the ‘old hen,’ but I fail to see the duckling,” replies Rupert, with a pleasant slight smile.
Formerly he would have been far too nervous to bandy jokes with his father, and they would have been stamped upon if he had; but the answering smile on the elder man’s grim sick face tells Lavinia upon how much happier terms son and father now are than in any previous period of their lives. She is the ribbon that ties their hearts together! She!
“Was he pretty fit? Did he set off in good spirits?” asks Sir George, holding on as firmly to the Binning theme as if he knew that he was passionately desired to loose it.