“Said he had dared, in a moment of insanity, to desecrate the cheek of the purest woman breathing with lips that ought to be branded for their criminal presumption. He could never atone, he ended, but he could never forget.”
“And asked you in the postscript to meet him in the golf-house. I quite understand,” observed Lady Millebrook. “Of course, you didn’t go?”
Clarice’s lovely gray-blue eyes opened. Her sensitive lips quivered.
“Oh! but I am afraid....” She heaved a little regretful sigh over her past folly. “That is where I was weak, Bettine. I went. Oh, don’t laugh!”
“My child, this is hysteria,” explained Lady Millebrook, removing the filmy handkerchief from her lovely eyes. “Well—you went. You popped your head into the lion’s mouth—and somehow or other Cadminster played the deus ex machina, and got it out for you again.”
“The golf-house was a queer shanty, with a tarred roof,” said Mrs. Tollebranch retrospectively. “It held a bunker of coals, and stands for clubs, and a fireplace, and a folding luncheon-table, and camp-stools, and hampers. We used to lunch outside when it didn’t rain or snow, and inside when it did. Well, when Willibrand and Sir Roger Balcombe, Major Wharfling, the Guardsmen, and Cadminster were quite out of sight, Pontoise and I somehow found ourselves back at the golf-house. I was cold, and there was a fire there, and he looked so handsome and so miserable as he stood bare-headed by the door, waiting for me to enter, that——”
“The fly walked in. And then the spider——”
“He disappointed me, I will own,” said Clarice, with a little gulp. “After all his penitent protestations! I have never trusted men with agate-colored eyes since, and I never will. They have only one idea of women, and that is—the worst. But when I ordered him to let go my hands and get up from his knees, something in my face or voice seemed to tell him that I was really, really, in earnest, and he obeyed me, and moved suddenly away as I went to the door. The latch rattled as I lifted my hand, the door opened; Cadminster stood there, white from head to foot, for a sudden blizzard had swept down from the hills, and the links were four inches deep in snow. Oh! I shall never forget how tactful he was! ‘You have got here before the rest of us!’ he said, quite in a cheery, ordinary way. ‘Lucky for you! Tollebranch and the others are coming after me as hard as they can pelt, and we shall have to put out the “House Full” boards in a minute.’ And he began to rattle out the flaps of the luncheon-table, and get out things from the hamper, and then he looked at me, and said, as he lifted the lid from a great kettle of Irish stew that had been simmering over the fire, ‘Suppose you were to take the ladle and give this mess a bit of a stir, Mrs. Tollebranch! The fire will burn your face, I’m afraid, but what woman wouldn’t sacrifice her complexion in the cause of duty?’ Oh, Bettine, I could have blessed Cadminster as I seized that iron ladle, for seeming so natural and at ease. And then—almost before I had begun to stir the stew—while I was bending over the pot, Willibrand and the other men came in. What followed I can never forget!”
“Now we come to Cadminster’s great act of heroism?” interrogated Lady Millebrook.
“Willibrand came in stamping the snow off,” went on Mrs. Tollebranch. “So did all the other men. Willibrand sniffed the odor of the oniony stew with rapture. All the other men sniffed too.”