The door, which had occasionally creaked throughout this discussion, smartly opened from without, and acting upon the Earl’s offended person as a battering-ram, caused him to run forwards smartly, tripping over the edge of the worn, but still splendid Turkey carpet. Lord Beaumaris saved himself by clinging to the high back of an ancestral chair, upon the seat of which he subsided, as the tall young figure of his daughter appeared on the threshold, her Tam-o’-shanter cap, her long yellow locks, and her red golfing jacket shining with moisture, her fresh cheeks red with the cold kisses of the March winds.
“It began to snow like Happy Jack,” said Susanna, pulling off her rough beaver gauntlet gloves, “so I came home. Well, have you all done plotting? You look like conspirators—all—with the exception of Alaric.”
This was true, for while the Earl, his mother, and three other members of the family council, whom we have not found it necessary to describe, wore an air of somewhat guilty perturbation, the drab-colored, mild countenance of Alaric, its diabolical left eye now blandly shuttered with its tinted eyeglass, alone appeared guiltless and unmoved.
“We’ve been discussing the September house-party,” explained this Catesby, as Susanna sat upon the elbow of his chair and affectionately rumpled his sparse, light-colored locks.
“And husbands for me!” said Susanna, half throttling Alaric with her strong young arm.
“Susanna!” cried her father. “I am surprised! I say no more than that I am surprised!”
“And I say,” retorted Susanna, in clear, defiant, ringing accents, as she swayed herself to and fro upon her narrow perch, “that it is beastly to be expected to marry just because money has got to be brought into the family. Of course I shall marry one day—I don’t want to study law, or be a hospital nurse like that idiotic Laura Penglebury. But I don’t want to be a married woman until I’m tired of being a girl. I want to have lots of fun and do lots of things, and see lots of people, and make my mind up for my own self. And——”
Lord Beaumaris, who had long been fermenting, frothed over. “When you form an alliance, my child, you will form it with my sanction and my approval, and the husband you honor with your hand will be a person selected and approved of by me. By me! I will choose for you——”
“And suppose I choose for myself afterwards!” cried Susanna, blue fire flashing from her defiant eyes.
“Every woman is at heart—ahem!” muttered Alaric, as Lord Beaumaris strove with incipient apoplexy. Susanna continued, with a whimper in her voice: