"If I am weak, I trust such weakness will be forgiven me," she whispered as she stood in the perfumed darkness, with a wandering summer wind playing refreshingly round her, and tears from some hidden fount of sadness stole down her cheeks. "If he were my own child he could not be dearer to me. I remember my stepmother once told me so. 'My boy has two mothers, Dinah,' these were her very words. Well, he is my Son of Consolation," and Dinah heaved a gentle sigh, as though the motherhood within her, the divine maternal instinct inherent in all true women, felt itself satisfied.
At breakfast the next morning Malcolm proffered his services; but Elizabeth assured him that Cedric and Johnson would do all that was required, so he spent his morning indolently down by the Pool—reading and indulging in his favourite daydreams—until Cedric joined him.
Cedric looked heated and tired.
"I never saw such a person as Betty for getting work out of a fellow," he grumbled. "She would do splendidly on a rice plantation—wouldn't the niggers fly just! Why, she set me rolling the tennis lawn, because she wanted Johnson; and then I had to bicycle over to Rotherwood for something that had been forgotten. I took it out in cool drinks though, I can tell you. My word, Bet does know how to make prime claret cup"—and Cedric smacked his lips with the air of a veteran gourmand; and then he sparred at Malcolm, and called him an absent-minded beggar, and asked if he had finished his ode to the naiad of the Pool, and made sundry other aggravating remarks, which proved that he was in excellent spirits and only wanted to find a safety-valve.
Just before the first carriage drove up, Malcolm, who was standing by Elizabeth on the terrace, suggested that she and Mr. Carlyon should give him and Cedric their revenge; but she told him quite seriously that they must not think of it for the present.
"The sets are all arranged, and Dinah and I must devote ourselves to our guests," she remarked; and as this was only reasonable, Malcolm said no more.
"I am going to introduce you to Tina Ross," she continued. "There she and her sister Patty are just coming up the drive now. She is a very good player, and your opponents will be Nora Brent and Mr. Carlyon."
"We are under orders, Herrick," observed David with mock humility; and then the introduction was made and the little white and blue fairy walked off demurely enough with Malcolm.
Tina Ross was certainly a very pretty girl; she had one of those babyish sort of faces that appeal so strongly to some men; her manners were kittenish and full of vivacity, and she had a way of glancing at a person from under her long curling lashes that was considered very alluring. "Do please be good and kind to a poor little harmless thing like me," they seemed to say to each fresh comer, "for you are such a nice man;" but Malcolm, who saw plenty of girls in town, took no notice of a little country chit's airs and graces; indeed, he thought Nora Brent far more attractive—human kittens not being to his taste.
"I don't think much of the fine gentleman from London," whispered Tina rather venomously to Nora when the game was finished. "I hate a town prig like poison."