‘The other man, without a doubt,’ thought the Baronet. ‘His wife must be dead.’
Miss Brandon had slipped unobserved out of the room. She was now sitting in the veranda, making-believe to be intent over her Latin verbs, but in reality waiting impatiently till the coast should be clear. She had not long to wait. Presently she heard the Captain say in his cheery loud-voiced way: ‘Come along, Sir Frederick; we shall just have time to look at the mare before luncheon;’ and a minute later, she heard the shutting of a door.
Then she shut her book, rose from her seat, and crossing on tiptoe to the open French-window, she peeped into the room. ‘Is that you, Charley?’ she asked in a voice that was little above a whisper.
‘Whom else should it be?’ answered the young man, looking round from the piano with a smile.
‘I was nearly sure of it from the first; but then you look such a guy!’
‘She calls me a guy! after all the trouble I have taken to get myself up like a foreign nobleman.’ Speaking thus, he took off his spectacles and wig, and stood revealed, as pleasant-looking a young fellow as one would see in a day’s march.
Elsie ran forward with a little cry of surprise and delight. ‘Now I know you for my own!’ she exclaimed; and when he took her in his arms and kissed her—more than once—she offered not the slightest resistance. ‘But what a dreadful risk to run!’ she went on as soon as she was set at liberty. ‘Suppose your uncle—good gracious!’
‘My uncle? He can’t eat me, that’s certain; and he has already cut me off with the proverbial shilling.’
‘My poor boy! Fate is very, very hard upon you. We are both down on our luck, Charley; but we can die together, can’t we?’ As she propounded this question, she held out her box of bon-bons. Charley took one, she took another, and then the box was put away. ‘A pan of charcoal’—she went on, giving her sweetmeat a gustatory turn over with her tongue—‘door and windows close shut—you go to sleep and forget to wake up. What could be simpler?’
‘Hardly anything. But we have not quite come to that yet. Of course, that dreadful Vice-chancellor won’t let me marry you for some time to come; but he can’t help himself when you are one-and-twenty.’