The young fellow drew backward from my hand with a movement of astonishment.
‘Impossible!’ he exclaimed.
‘Stop! Before you say a word—but stay: wait till we have dined. I have much to talk to you about. There will be no going to St. James’s Park this afternoon.’
My maid had entered to lay the cloth, and I broke off nodding and smiling at him, and went upstairs to remove my outdoor things.
CHAPTER XIV
SHE DRESSES AS A BOY
On our sitting down to dinner I made him gather by my looks that I would talk of anything sooner than Tom before my maid. When I had dismissed the girl, Will lay back in his chair and said: ‘It will be a withering stiff joke, Marian, if Butler sails in the Childe Harold. It will be precious awkward for me. I shan’t be able to speak to him, I suppose—not even to nod, I dare say. A perfectly innocent man, too; one of the best sailors out of London or Liverpool, a man who’s dined with father and mother and been a welcome guest at their house.’
I waited a moment and then said: ‘And my sweetheart, and husband some day. Why didn’t you add that?’
‘It was at the end of my tongue. It’ll increase the awkwardness. It’s beastly unpleasant enough to see the friend of your family dressed as a Newgate dandy and in chains, but when you’ve got to cut him—I mean when the sentinels won’t let you look at him—he being all the while your first and only cousin’s sweetheart and engaged to be married to her! But if he’s to be one of our convicts, I’ll take some big risks, Marian, to let him know that I consider him as innocent as I am, and that I’m all his friend down to the very heels of me.’