“Let us, being now on the footing of ’ostess and guest, part friendly,” he said. “Your Grace, may I take your ’and?”
“I think the formality absolutely unnecessary,” said the Duchess, ringing the bell.
Then the money-lender went away, and she caught up a little portrait of the Duke that stood upon her writing-table and began to cry over it and kiss it, and say incoherent, affectionate things, like quite an ordinary, commonplace young wife. For, after eighteen months of marriage, she had fallen seriously in love with her quiet, well-bred, intellectual husband, and the remembrance of the silly, romantic flirtation with dead Hugh Delaving was gall and wormwood to the palate that had learned a finer taste. How had she fallen so low as to write those idiotic, gushing letters?
Their perfume sickened her. She shuddered at the touch of them, as she would have shuddered at the touch of the man to whom they had been written had he still lived. But he was dead, and she had never let him kiss her. She was thankful to remember that, as she put the letters in the fire and watched them blacken and burst into flame.
“My dear Ethelwyne,” asked the Duke, “where did you pick up Mr. Rubelius? Or, I should ask, perhaps, how did that gentleman attain to your acquaintance?”
“It is rather a long, dull story,” said his wife, “but he is really an excellent person, if a little vulgar, and—— You won’t bother me any more about him, Rantorlie, will you?”
She clasped her gloved hands about her husband’s arm as they stood together on the river beach below Rantorlie. The turbid flood of the Haste, tinged brown by spate, raced past between its rocky banks; the pine-forests climbed to meet the mountains, and the mountains lifted to the sky their crowns of snow. There was a smell of spring in the air, and word of new-run fish in the string of deep pools below the famous Falls.
“I will not, if you particularly wish it,” said her husband. “But to banish your guest from my mind—that is impossible. For one thing, he is hung with air-belts, bottles, and canteens, as though he were starting for a tour in the wildest part of Norway. I believe his equipment includes a hatchet, and I think that wad he wears upon his shoulders is a rubber tent, but I am not sure. He has never heard of prawn-baiting, his rods are of the most alarming weight and size, and his salmon-flies are as large and gaudy as paroquets, and calculated, McDona says, to frighten any self-respecting fish out of his senses. We can’t allow such a gorgeous tyro to spoil the best water. He must be sent to some of the smaller pools, with a man to look after him.”
“But he—he won’t be likely to catch anything there, will he?” asked the Duchess anxiously.