It was not quite a fair question. Ethel, in her simple honesty, not caring to enter on a course of that verbal fencing which comes so naturally to a woman whose heart has not yet learned to speak, made no reply. Her colour deepened, and she became very intent indeed upon the bruised trail of the rose-tree.
‘I am going away, as you know, and that very soon. My plans for the winter are quite undecided. I may not be back at High Tor for a good while,’ said the heir to that mansion.
Now there were to be certain autumn manœuvres in the open country near Aldershot Camp, in which that regiment of militia in which Lord Harrogate was a captain, and towards the perfection of whose drill and discipline he was thought to have contributed more than most militia officers find it convenient to do, had been selected to figure among the auxiliary forces on that occasion.
‘Some friends want me,’ explained Lord Harrogate, ‘when our amateur soldiering is over, to go with them on a yacht-cruise in the Mediterranean, and so on to Egypt, and perhaps farther. What I choose will very much depend on you, Miss Gray.’
‘On me!’ She could not avoid answering this time, and her tone was one of genuine surprise. ‘On me, Lord Harrogate!’
‘On you. I should like all my plans to have some reference to you—Ethel!’ said the young man, trying to get a full view of the beautiful blushing face that was half averted. ‘I say again, can you guess why?’
‘Do not ask me to guess,’ returned Ethel, with a trembling lip. She was very much frightened. She had not the least experience in that science of flirtation in which the modern young lady graduates so early. But she divined that words had been said which rendered it necessary that other words should be spoken, and with what result! Could it be that the end of the interview would be the dashing down of the half-idolised image that her fancy had set up as the emblem of pure chivalry?
‘Only because I love you—love you very dearly, Ethel!’ said the heir of High Tor; and as he spoke he took her unresisting hand in his and drew her towards him. For a moment Ethel was spellbound, her whole faculties absorbed in the one fact that he had told her that he loved her. Come what might, those words—those dear delicious words had sunk into her ear, and the memory of them must remain to the end of what would very likely be a lonely, loveless life; a treasure, her very own, of which none could rob her! But in the next minute Ethel drew her hand away from the hand that held it, and the crimson of indignant anger mounted to her cheek.
‘My lord,’ she said, in a voice that all her wish to speak and act calmly could not render quite steady, ‘you should not have done this. I could not have believed it of you. It is not generous. It is not like yourself.’
‘Why not?’ Lord Harrogate blundered out the words awkwardly enough; but Ethel misunderstood him.