"All right," Peckover responded cheerfully. "I promise to let her alone if she lets me alone. I'm not the man to stand in Sharnbrook's light."
His arm was round her and his lips three inches from hers, when a vigorous exclamation of disgust from the window made it expedient that even they should pretend to be engaged in quite another of the varied but limited number of occupations which necessitate the heads of two persons being close together. Nevertheless Dagmar found time, before the window opened to admit Gage, who had come down for an hour, and Ethel, to say hurriedly but with none the less fell intent, "Remember your promise. You will be true to me, now?"
Miss Ethel, rendered thoughtfully emulative by the evidences of her sister's progress, contented herself with tossing her head peremptorily and disdainfully at her treacherous sister. Further activity on the part of the young ladies was, however, postponed by the announcement of tea. Gage lingered behind to say a word to his friend.
"Beats me," he observed sourly, "what's the matter with this peerage. Always thought a lord had it all his own way. Instead of that, the girls talk about the weather and the flower-beds to me, and they drop into your arms one after the other."
"They're a bit calculating all the same," Peckover remarked with a sense of failure. "I don't know that we might not just as well have been talking about the weather."
But John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook came in whistling and radiant.
CHAPTER XXII
It was to appear that Mr. Carnaby Leo and his sister were not to be put off so easily as the confederates imagined. Encouraged by what they considered the other side's weakness, and led on by their ignorance of European ways, they—or rather the lady—grew determined to make out of their trip a much bigger coup than at first seemed likely to be forthcoming from what was really nothing but a huge piece of bluff. It is true that Lady Agatha, with her unassailable manner, was a serious obstacle in the path which this enterprising couple proposed to take, but she, after all, Lalage argued, was but an outside and detached factor in the affair, an outlying rampart, as it were, in the defence.
Nevertheless the influence of her repellent personality was so great that neither of the Leos cared to come face to face with her again if that situation could by any possibility be avoided, and in their councils of war (in which Lalage tried to teach her thick-witted brother how to back up her brain by his muscle) the temporary mistress of Staplewick was never regarded as a negligible quantity.