‘He lunched with us to-day at Orange Grove!’ Harry answered, puckering his brow a little. ‘And her father actually wants her to marry that fellow! By Jove, what a desecration!’
‘Then you don’t like what you’ve seen so far of Mr Tom?’ Marian asked with a smile.
Harry rose and leaned against the piazza pillar with his hands behind him. ‘The man’s a cad,’ he answered briefly.
‘If we were in Piccadilly again,’ Edward Hawthorn said quietly, ‘I should say that was probably a piece of pure class prejudice, Noel; but as we are in Trinidad, and as I happen to know Mr Tom Dupuy by two or three pieces of personal adventure, I don’t mind telling you in strict confidence, I cordially agree with you.’
‘Ah!’ Harry Noel cried with much amusement, clapping him heartily on his broad shoulder. ‘So coming to Trinidad has knocked some of that radical humbug and nonsense clean out of you, has it, Teddy? I knew it would, my dear fellow; I knew you’d get rid of it!’
‘On the contrary, Mr Noel,’ Marian answered with quiet dignity, ‘I think it has really made us a great deal more confirmed in our own opinions than we were to begin with. We have suffered a great deal ourselves, you know, since we came to Trinidad.’
Harry flushed in the face a little. ‘You needn’t tell me all about it, Mrs Hawthorn,’ he said uneasily. ‘I’ve heard something about the matter already from the two Dupuys, and all I can say is, I never heard before such a foolish, ridiculous, nonsensical, cock-and-bull prejudice as the one they told me about, in the whole course of my precious existence. If it hadn’t been for Nora’s sake—I mean for Miss Dupuy’s’—and he checked himself suddenly—‘upon my word, I really think I should have knocked the fellow down in his uncle’s dining-room the very first moment he began to speak about it.’
‘Mr Noel,’ Marian said, ‘I know how absurd it must seem to you, but you can’t imagine how much Edward and I have suffered about it since we’ve been in this island.’
‘I can,’ Harry answered. ‘I can understand it easily. I had a specimen of it myself from those fellows at lunch this morning. I kept as calm as I could outwardly; but, by Jove, Mrs Hawthorn, it made my blood boil over within me to hear the way they spoke of your husband.—Upon my honour, if it weren’t for—for Miss Dupuy,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘I wouldn’t stop now a single night to accept that man’s hospitality after the way he spoke about you.’
‘No, no; do stop,’ Marian answered simply. ‘We want you so much to marry Nora; and we want to save her from that horrid man her father has chosen for her.’