If, under these circumstances, the young fellow had been unaffected by the incense offered to him he would have been more than mortal. But he was not. He began, before he had been in the house an hour, to change, all unconsciously of course, his standpoint. He began to wonder especially why he had been so depressed during the last few days, and why he had troubled himself so much about the opinions of people whose views no sensible man would regard.
Perhaps the girl beside him—he took in Laura—contributed as much as anything to this. It was not only that she was bright and sparkling, in the luxury of her pearls and evening dress even enchanting, nor only that the femininity which had enslaved Stephen Clode began to have its effects on her new neighbor. But Laura had a way while she talked to him, while her lustrous brown eyes dwelt momentarily on his, of removing herself and himself to a world apart—a world in which downrightness seemed more downright and rudeness an outrage. And so, while her manner gently soothed and flattered her companion, it led him almost insensibly to—well, to put it in the concrete—to think scorn of Mr. Bonamy.
“You have had a misunderstanding,” she said softly, as they stood together by the piano after dinner, a feathering plant or two fencing them off in a tiny solitude of their own, “with Mr. Bonamy, have you not, Mr. Lindo?”
From anyone else, perhaps from her half an hour before, he would have resented mention of the matter. Now he did not seem to mind. “Something of the kind,” he said, laughing.
“About the sheep in the churchyard, was it not?” she continued.
“Yes.”
“Well, will you pardon me saying something?” Resting both her hands on the raised lid of the piano, she looked up at him, and it must be confessed that he thought he had never seen eyes so soft and brilliant before. “It is only this,” she said earnestly. “That I hope you will not give way to him. He is a wretched, cross-grained, fidgety man and full of crotchets. You know all about him, of course?” she added, a slight ring of pride in her voice.
“I know that he is my church warden,” said the rector, half in seriousness.
“Yes!” she replied. “That is just what he is fit for!”
“You think so?” Lindo retorted, smiling. “Then you really mean that I should be guided by him? That is it?”