At this moment, Clarice emerged from the hotel. Lady Renshaw greeted her with a smile of much amiability. ‘I trust that dear Madame De Vigne is better this morning?’ she said. ‘I have been so grieved by her indisposition. But, really, on Wednesday I myself found the heat most trying. I cannot wonder at her prostration.’
‘My sister is a little better this morning, thank you, Lady Renshaw,’ answered Clarice in her gently serious way. ‘I trust that by to-morrow she will be well enough to join us down-stairs.’
‘I hope so, with all my heart,’ answered her ladyship with as much fervour as if she were repeating a response at church.
After a few more words, Clarice and Mr Etheridge went their way. As her ladyship turned to go indoors, Miss Wynter, escorted by Mr Golightly in his boating flannels, emerged from the hotel. They had breakfasted an hour before her ladyship, who was a somewhat late riser. Dick had said to Bella at table: ‘I want you to go on the water this morning. It’s going to be a bit cloudy later on, I think, and it’s just possible that the perch may be in the humour for biting.’
‘As if he cared a fig about the perch!’ said Bella to herself. ‘The wretch only wants to get me into a boat all to himself, and then he thinks he can say what he likes to me.’ She trembled a little, feeling that the crisis of her fate was at hand. She would have liked to mutiny and say, ‘I shan’t go,’ as under similar circumstances she would have said to any other man. But with Dick, poor Dick! who had run such risks for her sake, and had done so much to win her, she felt that she could not be so cruel. Besides, she had a woman’s natural curiosity to hear what he would say. ‘And I needn’t say “Yes” unless I choose to,’ she remarked to herself; but in her heart of hearts she knew that her ‘No,’ if uttered at all, would be a very faint one indeed. As it was, she merely looked at him a little superciliously for a moment or two, and then quietly assented.
‘I trust, dear Mr Golightly, that you are thoroughly competent to manage a boat?’ remarked her ladyship, when she had been told where the young people were going.
‘Rather,’ answered Richard a little brusquely. ‘I didn’t pull stroke in the Camford Eight, seven years ago, for nothing.’
‘I only spoke because I’m told that the lake is most treacherous, and that a year rarely passes without one or more fatalities.—Bella, darling, I think you ought to have taken a warmer shawl with you. The air on the water is often chilly.’ Then in an aside: ‘Be careful what you are about. If he proposes, only accept him provisionally. This affair of Archie Ridsdale’s is by no means at an end yet.’
Bella nodded. ‘Too late, aunty, too late,’ she said to herself. ‘I’m very much afraid that I can’t help myself.’
Lady Renshaw, as she turned away, remarked to herself: ‘I’m not sure that young Golightly is quite such a nincompoop as I took him to be at first. But in any case, Bella ought to be able to twist him round her finger.’