“Guess where—I should say guess what. Did you know I telephoned?” said Dudley Manners all at once; and then having leaped from the trap and bent above my hand he turned to the lady who had sat beside him, an exquisite elderly woman with a lapful of fresia. “This is Mrs. Manners,” he said with charming pride. “The fact is, we’ve just been married in the chapel there.”
At this my heart leaped to a thousand tunes all carrying one happy air.
“You see,” he was explaining, looking up at us with an eagerness almost boyish in his transfigured face, “we—we decided rather suddenly. And we telephoned over to you an hour ago to get you to come and stand by us—”
“Telephoned to us—at the lodge?” I cried in dismay. “O, who came to the telephone?”
Dudley Manners looked as if he wondered what that had to do with his happiness.
“I really don’t know,” he said. “The voice was familiar. I thought at first it might have been you, Etarre. And then they cut us off; and then a terrible voice thundered that neither of you was there. How did you know what we wanted?” he went back to his text.
But as for me I could think only of the terror of those poor little people, and I could guess that Nichola must some way have come to the rescue. I knew her voice over the telephone, like all three voices of Cerberus, saying, “Not at home.”
“Dudley,” said I faintly, “Pelleas—tell him. Ask him.”
I gave Dudley Manners my hand and got to the ground, trembling, and crossed to the trap where the lady was so tranquilly seated, with the fresia in her lap. I said insane, unremembered vagaries to her, all the time listening to that murmur beside the phaeton and knowing that the fate of our little lovers was being decided then and there. And suddenly it came to me that the face in which I was looking was uncommonly sweet and kindly and that inasmuch as she was Mrs. Manners and a bride I might give her my confidence and win her heart for my hope. But when I turned boldly to tell her something of the charming case she was holding out to me some sprays of her fresia.
“Won’t you have this?” she said. “It is a very rare species.”