“Call it what you choose, my dear.” Sir Giles was now recovering from the shock of the unexpected onslaught. “I have said the crackle is no more entailed than Overton Foxshott or the Lowndes Square house—or anything else that at present I may call my own. If I were a younger man, I might plunder my mother and disappoint my promised wife for the pleasure of making a considerable present of jewelry to a woman ten years my senior. As it is——”
Sir Giles did not finish the speech, but strode angrily out and got into the cart, and gave Polly a short, gruff “Good-bye,” as he drove away, leaving that puzzled young woman on the doorsteps.
“‘Plunder my mother and disappoint my promised wife.... Present of jewelry ... a woman ten years his senior.’... Can Cis have been giving jewels to Mrs. Osborne?” Polly wondered. The course of her love affair had run so smoothly that she was at a loss to account for the pain at her heart and the fever in her veins. Sir Giles’s complaint she diagnosed correctly. He was jealous ... jealous of Cis! He was angry with Polly. He had reminded her that he could do as he liked with his own, that the county might call her an heiress, but the county had no certain grounds for the assertion. Jealous and angry, the dear, cheery Dad. Because Cis chose to loll upon the grass at the skirts of a woman who was his senior by many more years than ten. Polly ordered round Kiss-me-Quick, and rode over to Hengs Hall, pondering these things in her mind. Much had been revealed to her, but it was for Lady Smithgill to lift the last corner of the veil and disclose to Cis’s future wife the true meaning of Sir Giles’s reference to jewels.
“So Cis gave her the pearls, and Dad has given her the crackle to recover lost ground. Mrs. Osborne must be a clever woman,” Polly reflected, as she rode slowly home through the sunset lanes on Kiss-me-Quick.
“How was it going to end, all this?
“If Dad married Mrs. Osborne, it will be extremely unpleasant to possess a stepmother who has been made love to by one’s husband. And should Mrs. Osborne succeed in marrying Cis——” Polly tightened the reins involuntarily, and Kiss-me-Quick quickened her paces. “Let her, if she wants him. No; let him if he wants her. But first—oh, first—there will be a Tug of War! I will not endure to be routed on my own ground by this designing charlataness,” thought Polly.
In London it might have happened—almost without remark. But here—here in the open—under familiar pitying, curious eyes.... Never, never, never! And with each repetition of the word Kiss-me-Quick danced at a cut of the whip. For Polly was humane, yet human.
The double report of a gun in one of the Heng coppices gave Kiss-me-Quick an excuse for more dancing, and presently, as Polly looked, shading her blue eyes with her half-gauntleted right hand, Cis and a keeper came plainly into view. She pulled up Kiss-me-Quick and waited, as the young man, leaving his gun with the keeper, crossed the hot stubbles dangling a brace of birds.
“Why, Polly dear!” He tried to look natural and at ease as he lifted his leather cap from his crisp brown waves. “If you had told me you thought of riding over to see the mother, I’d have called for you and brought you over.”
“It was a sudden idea, Cis,” Polly said, as she gave him her gloved hand.