“Indeed!” snapped Moira, with a mutinous shrug of pretty shoulders.
“Yes,” said O’Hagan. “I will tell you why. He is a handsome, fine man, and one of a brave and ancient race. He loves you in a way altogether different from Repton’s way.”
“Has he told you so?”—frigidly.
“No. I have not had an opportunity to speak to him yet! But it is so. With the stimulus of your affection, Moira, with the chance of such a prize as you, he will go far. I understand men of family, my dear, and I tell you that Bruce is a splendid fellow. As for you, Moira, I can only say that I should like to marry you, myself! But since that is impossible, I want it to be Bruce.”
He was curiously impersonal; a kind of directing Beneficence which from an Olympic height smoothed the tangled skeins of lesser lives. But there was a finality in his pronouncements against whose thrall the girl fought stubbornly with all the armoury of her woman-soul. For another than Bernard O’Hagan thus to have championed McIvor must have spelled ruin for McIvor’s cause; but if O’Hagan had been pressing the suit of an unknown, and not that of one towards whom the girl was predisposed favourably, his advocacy must have told. Moira experienced a sense of weakness; later, of absolute futility.
Once submit to the yoke of O’Hagan’s regal patronage, and you are lost. You become a mere pawn. His majestic interference is a stupendous force.
Mr. Repton appeared to claim a dance.
Muffled thunder seemed to be called for and a little incidental music in the form of a sustained chord in G minor.
“I have been having a chat with Moira, sir,” said O’Hagan, haughtily, rising as Repton entered.
The muscles of Repton’s jaws stood out, lumpish.