This was a strange experience—a woman refusing a man, and then asking him to make love to another. I had read much of the doings of the sex, but this situation beat anything I had ever seen on the stage. Miss Finche’s evident self-possession, not a ripple in her voice, told how truly she spoke when she told the luckless love-sick youth she did not care for him, while the coolness, not to say the audacity, of the proposition almost staggered me. And Miss Neville—was not she to be consulted in the business? I was very much mistaken in my estimate of that young lady if she would haul down her colors at the bidding of any captain afloat, if she had not a mind so to do herself.
When I arrived, all alone, at the cottage, it was to find Miss Finche flirting heavily with Mr. Herbert Price, Miss Neville playing a brilliant fantasia of Chopin’s upon the piano, and, mirabile dictu, Mr. Grey Seymour, his face, his neck, his ears in a rosy glow, leaning over her and turning the leaves of the music. Could he have—pshaw! impossible.
“You know Mrs. Dyke Howell?” was Mr. Price’s observation, as we turned out of Sea View Cottage on our way to the Ocean House.
“Very slightly.”
“But you do know her?”
“Well—yes.”
“You’ll get me a card for her garden party to-morrow?”
“Well, considering that I haven’t got one for myself, I—”
“That’s nothing to the point. A man can ask a favor for a friend he wouldn’t ask for himself, you know.”
“But you are not my friend.”