“If you died unmarried, at Uncle George’s death the Campion family would be extinct?”
The surprise in the next “yes” is emphasized.
“But you are very young still?” she asks, as if in appeal from some maintenance of a contrary contention to him. “No one could expect you to marry yet?”
He looks back at her in dumb astonishment. Save in yesterday’s laughing argument as to which of them had originally wooed the other, the question of their engagement has scarcely ever been referred to by her.
“And I am young too!” she goes on, in that puzzlingly pleading voice, as if still answering some invisible objector. “Most sensible people think that a woman should not marry before five and twenty!”
“Is this the Rectory?” he asks, in a tone where wonder seems to strive with a half-distrust.
“Must the Rectory supply all my ideas?” retorts she, half-laughing, yet still with that new sense of constraint. “Mayn’t I be allowed to have any of my own?”
He shakes his curly head—the head which is never shorn quite close enough to suit his father’s taste.
“The voice is the voice of Lavinia; but the words are the words of Susan,” he says, drily.
“She had an idea—built upon, I do not exactly know what”—reddening faintly at her own disingenuousness, and yet unable to break the lifelong habit of taking Rupert into her confidence—“that your father—that the change in—that poor Bill’s death, in short, might make it desirable that we should——” She stops, jibbing at the matter-of-fact word which yet has always closed the vista of her lookings into the future as a thing of course.