“Ready!” he repeats distrustfully. “A man, if he has any pluck, may be ready to go to the gallows!”
Lavinia makes a face between a laugh and a frown.
“Choose your own words,” she says, the habit of a lifetime controlling and smoothing away any outward expression of impatience.
But he will not let her off. “Are you glad to marry him? Do you feel that it is essential to your happiness?” he asks, pressing home his inquiries with a persistency that he imagines to be conscientious, but which she feels to be cruel and perverse.
“Glad!” she repeats, dragging out the word a little, to give herself time to find the right phrase of tactful truth. “Haven’t I always been glad that I was to be part and parcel of you both? My gladness is no shoddy new thing.”
He looks at her captiously, the unhappy bent of his disposition causing him to feel a half-distrust of the candid eyes and the honest voice that yet always bring a warmth about his heart.
“If Rupert does not marry you, he will probably marry some one else,” he growls. “And between you and me, I cannot quite depend on his taste!”
It is said with no wounding intention. Never would it have occurred to the father that any one could take exception against him for making disparaging comments on his own son of his body begotten; but used as she is to them, never does Lavinia fail to protest.
“I like his taste,” she answers pleasantly and gallantly. “He thinks me very good-looking.”
But her companion’s thought stumps undistracted by her playfulness along its own track, as doggedly as his feet along the bridle-path.