At this helping of the lame dog over the stile, Sir Geoffrey looked grateful. ‘Has she ever impressed you, Le Gautier?’
‘Alas, yes,’ was the melancholy reply, but with some feeling too, for, as far as he was concerned, the passion was genuine. ‘Why should I strive to conceal my honest love? I may be poor and unknown, but I am at least a gentleman, and I offer the greatest compliment man can pay a woman—an ardent, loving heart.—But I am rambling; I dream, I rave! That I should aspire to an alliance with the House of Charteris!’
The baronet was somewhat moved by this display of manly emotion, and, moreover, his pride was tickled. The young man evidently knew that what he aspired to was a high honour indeed.
‘But, Sir Geoffrey,’ he continued brokenly, ‘you will not breathe a word of this to a soul! In a moment of passion, I have been led to divulge the master-passion of my life. Promise me you will forget it from this hour;’ and saying these words, he stretched out a hand trembling with suppressed emotion to his host and friend. A good actor was lost to an admiring world here.
‘But bless me!’ Sir Geoffrey exclaimed, taken aback by this display, and, sooth to say, somewhat irritated that the necessary explanation must come from him after all, ‘I want you to marry the girl.’
‘Is it possible, or am I dreaming?’ Le Gautier cried in a delirium of rapture. ‘Do I hear aright? Oh, say these words again!’
Le Gautier was slightly overdoing the thing now, and Sir Geoffrey knew it. ‘I mean what I say,’ he added coldly. ‘You are the man for Enid.’
‘Who is talking about Enid?’ asked a fresh clear voice at that moment, as the subject of discourse, accompanied by her escort, glided into the room. Le Gautier, in love as he was, thought he had never seen her look so fair as she did then, her face slightly tinged with colour, her eyes all aglow with pleasurable excitement. For a moment the conspirators were abashed, and it took all the Frenchman’s cool equitable nerve to solve and explain what appeared to be a truly awkward question.
‘When we are not with the rose, we love to talk of her,’ he replied with one of these bold glances for which Maxwell longed to kick him on the spot.—‘I trust you have spent a pleasant morning?’
Enid answered as coldly as the dictates of breeding would allow. The man’s florid compliments were odious to her, and his presence oppressive. Le Gautier, accustomed to read men and faces like open books, did not fail to note this.