Kitabı oku: «Mount Royal: A Novel. Volume 2 of 3», sayfa 10
CHAPTER XI
"WHO KNOWS NOT CIRCE?"
The autumn days crept by, sometimes grey and sad of aspect, sometimes radiant and sunny, as if summer had risen from her grave amidst fallen leaves and faded heather. It was altogether a lovely autumn, like that beauteous season of five years ago, and Christabel and Angus wandered about the hills, and lingered by the trout stream in the warm green valley, almost as freely as they had done in the past. They were never alone – Jessie Bridgeman was always with them – very often Dopsy and Mopsy – and sometimes Mr. Tregonell with Captain Vandeleur and half a dozen dogs. One day they all went up the hill, and crossed the ploughed field to the path among the gorse and heather above Pentargon Bay – and Dopsy and Mopsy climbed crags and knolls, and screamed affrightedly, and made a large display of boots, and were generally fascinating after their manner.
"If any place could tempt me to smoke it would be this," said Dopsy, gazing seaward. All the men except Angus were smoking. "I think it must be utterly lovely to sit dreaming over a cigarette in such a place as this."
"What would you dream about," asked Angus. "A new bonnet?"
"Don't be cynical. You think I am awfully shallow, because I am not a perambulating bookshelf like Mrs. Tregonell, who seems to have read all the books that ever were printed."
"There you are wrong. She has read a few —non multa sed multum– but they are the very best, and she has read them well enough to remember them," answered Angus, quietly.
"And Mop and I often read three volumes in a day, and seldom remember a line of what we read," sighed Dopsy. "Indeed, we are awfully ignorant. Of course we learnt things at school – French and German – Italian – natural history – physical geography – geology – and all the onomies. Indeed, I shudder when I remember what a lot of learning was poured into our poor little heads, and how soon it all ran out again."
Dopsy gave her most fascinating giggle, and sat in an æsthetic attitude idly plucking up faded heather blossoms with a tightly gloved hand, and wondering whether Mr. Hamleigh noticed how small the hand was. She thought she was going straight to his heart with these naïve confessions; she had always heard that men hated learned women, and no doubt Mr. Hamleigh's habit of prosing about books with Mrs. Tregonell was merely the homage he payed to his hostess.
"You and Mrs. Tregonell are so dreadfully grave when you get together," pursued Dopsy, seeing that her companion held his peace. She had contrived to be by Mr. Hamleigh's side when he crossed the field, and had in a manner got possessed of him for the rest of the afternoon, barring some violent struggle for emancipation on his part. "I always wonder what you can find to say to each other."
"I don't think there is much cause for wonder. We have many tastes in common. We are both fond of music – of Nature – and of books. There is a wide field for conversation."
"Why won't you talk with me of books. There are some books I adore. Let us talk about Dickens."
"With all my heart. I admire every line he wrote – I think him the greatest genius of this age. We have had great writers – great thinkers – great masters of style – but Scott and Dickens were the Creators – they made new worlds and peopled them. I am quite ready to talk about Dickens."
"I don't think I could say a single word after that outburst of yours," said Dopsy; "you go too fast for me."
He had talked eagerly, willing to talk just now even to Miss Vandeleur, trying not too vividly to remember that other day – that unforgotten hour – in which, on this spot, face to face with that ever changing, ever changeless sea, he had submitted his fate to Christabel, not daring to ask for her love, warning her rather against the misery that might come to her from loving him. And misery had come, but not as he presaged. It had come from his youthful sin, that one fatal turn upon the road of life which he had taken so lightly, tripping with joyous companions along a path strewn with roses. He, like so many, had gathered his roses while he might, and had found that he had to bear the sting of their thorns when he must.
Leonard came up behind them as they talked, Mr. Hamleigh standing by Miss Vandeleur's side, digging his stick into the heather and staring idly at the sea.
"What are you two talking about so earnestly?" he asked; "you are always together. I begin to understand why Hamleigh is so indifferent to sport."
The remark struck Angus as strange, as well as underbred. Dopsy had contrived to inflict a good deal of her society upon him at odd times; but he had taken particular care that nothing in his bearing or discourse should compromise either himself or the young lady.
Dopsy giggled faintly, and looked modestly at the heather. It was still early in the afternoon, and the western light shone full upon a face which might have been pretty if Nature's bloom had not long given place to the poetic pallor of the powder-puff.
"We were talking about Dickens," said Dopsy, with an elaborate air of struggling with the tumult of her feelings. "Don't you adore him?"
"If you mean the man who wrote books, I never read 'em," answered Leonard; "life isn't long enough for books that don't teach you anything. I've read pretty nearly every book that was ever written upon horses and dogs and guns, and a good many on mechanics; that's enough for me. I don't care for books that only titillate one's imagination. Why should one read books to make oneself cry and to make oneself laugh? It's as idiotic a habit as taking snuff to make oneself sneeze."
"That's rather a severe way of looking at the subject," said Angus.
"It's a practical way, that's all. My wife surfeits herself with poetry. She is stuffed with Tennyson and Browning, loaded to the very muzzle with Byron and Shelley. She reads Shakespeare as devoutly as she reads her Bible. But I don't see that it helps to make her pleasant company for her husband or her friends. She is never so happy as when she has her nose in a book; give her a bundle of books and a candle and she would be happy in the little house on the top of Willapark."
"Not without you and her boy," said Dopsy, gushingly. "She could never exist without you two."
Mr. Tregonell lit himself another cigar, and strolled off without a word.
"He has not lovable manners, has he?" inquired Dopsy, with her childish air; "but he is so good-hearted."
"No doubt. You have known him some time, haven't you?" inquired Angus, who had been struggling with an uncomfortable yearning to kick the Squire into the Bay.
The scene offered such temptations. They were standing on the edge of the amphitheatre, the ground shelving steeply downward in front of them, rocks and water below. And to think that she – his dearest, she, all gentleness and refinement, was mated to this coarse clay! Was King Marc such an one as this he wondered, and if he were, who could be angry with Tristan – Tristan who died longing to see his lost love – struck to death by his wife's cruel lie – Tristan whose passionate soul passed by metempsychosis into briar and leaf, and crept across the arid rock to meet and mingle with the beloved dead. Oh, how sweet and sad the old legend seemed to Angus to-day, standing above the melancholy sea, where he and she had stood folded in each other's arms in the sweet triumphant moment of love's first avowal.
Dopsy did not allow him much leisure for mournful meditation. She prattled on in that sweetly girlish manner which was meant to be all spirit and sparkle – glancing from theme to theme, like the butterfly among the flowers, and showing a level ignorance on all. Mr. Hamleigh listened with Christian resignation, and even allowed himself to be her escort home – and to seem especially attentive to her at afternoon tea: for although it may take two to make a quarrel, assuredly one, if she be but brazen enough, may make a flirtation. Dopsy felt that time was short, and that strong measures were necessary. Mr. Hamleigh had been very polite – attentive even. Dopsy, accustomed to the free and easy manners of her brother's friends, mistook Mr. Hamleigh's natural courtesy to the sex for particular homage to the individual. But he had "said nothing," and she was no nearer the assurance of becoming Mrs. Hamleigh than she had been on the evening of his arrival. Dopsy had been fain to confess this to Mopsy in the confidence of sisterly discourse.
"It seems as if I might just as well have had a try for him myself, instead of standing out to give you a better chance," retorted Mopsy, somewhat scornfully.
"Go in and win, if you can," said Dopsy. "It won't be the first time you've tried to cut me out."
Dopsy, embittered by the sense of failure, determined on new tactics. Hitherto she had been all sparkle – now she melted into a touching sadness.
"What a delicious old room this is," she murmured, glancing round at the bookshelves and dark panelling, the high wide chimney piece with its coat-of-arms, in heraldic colours, flashing and gleaming against a background of brown oak. "I cannot help feeling wretched at the idea that next week I shall be far away from this dear place – in dingy, dreary London. Oh, Mr. Hamleigh," – detaining him while she selected one particular piece of sugar from the basin he was handing her – "don't you detest London?"
"Not absolutely. I have sometimes found it endurable."
"Ah, you have your clubs – just the one pleasantest street in all the great overgrown city – and that street lined with palaces, whose doors are always standing open for you. Libraries, smoking rooms, billiard-tables, perfect dinners, and all that is freshest and brightest in the way of society. I don't wonder men like London. But for women it has only two attractions – Mudie, and the shop-windows!"
"And the park – the theatres – the churches – the delight of looking at other women's gowns and bonnets. I thought that could never pall?"
"It does, though. There comes a time when one feels weary of everything," said Dopsy, pensively stirring her tea, and so fixing Mr. Hamleigh with her conversation that he was obliged to linger – yea, even to set down his own teacup on an adjacent table, and to seat himself by the charmer's side.
"I thought you so delighted in the theatres," he said. "You were full of enthusiasm about the drama the night I first dined here."
"Was I?" demanded Dopsy, naïvely. "And now I feel as if I did not care a straw about all the plays that were ever acted – all the actors who ever lived. Strange, is it not, that one can change so, in one little fortnight."
"The change is an hallucination. You are fascinated by the charms of a rural life, which you have not known long enough for satiety. You will be just as fond of plays and players when you get back to London."
"Never," exclaimed Dopsy. "It is not only my taste that is changed. It is myself. I feel as if I were a new creature."
"What a blessing for yourself and society if the change were radical," said Mr. Hamleigh, within himself; and then he answered, lightly.
"Perhaps you have been attending the little chapel at Boscastle, secretly imbibing the doctrines of advanced Methodism, and this is a spiritual awakening."
"No," sighed Dopsy, shaking her head, pensively, as she gazed at her teacup. "It is an utter change. I cannot make it out. I don't think I shall ever care for gaiety – parties – theatres – dress – again."
"Oh, this must be the influence of the Methodists."
"I hate Methodists! I never spoke to one in my life. I should like to go into a convent. I should like to belong to a Protestant sisterhood, and to nurse the poor in their own houses. It would be nasty; I should catch some dreadful complaint, and die, I daresay; but it would be better than what I feel now."
And Dopsy, taking advantage of the twilight, and the fact that she and Angus were at some distance from the rest of the party, burst into tears. They were very real tears – tears of vexation, disappointment, despair; and they made Angus very uncomfortable.
"My dear Miss Vandeleur, I am so sorry to see you distressed. Is there anything on your mind? Is there anything that I can do. Shall I fetch your sister."
"No, no," gasped Dopsy, in a choked voice. "Please don't go away. I like you to be near me."
She put out her hand – a chilly, tremulous hand, with no passion in it save the passionate pain of despair, and touched his, timidly, entreatingly, as if she were calling upon him for pity and help. She was, indeed, in her inmost heart, asking him to rescue her from the great dismal swamp of poverty and disrepute: to take her to himself, and give her a place and status among well-bred people, and make her life worth living.
This was dreadful. Angus Hamleigh, in all the variety of his experience of womankind, had never before found himself face to face with this kind of difficulty. He had not been blind to Miss Vandeleur's strenuous endeavours to charm him. He had parried those light arrows lightly: but he was painfully embarrassed by this appeal to his compassion. It was a new thing for him to sit beside a weeping woman, whom he could neither love nor admire, but from whom he could not withhold his pity.
"I daresay her life is dismal enough," he thought, "with such a brother as Poker Vandeleur – and a father to match."
While he sat in silent embarrassment, and while Dopsy slowly dried her tears with a gaudy little coloured handkerchief, taken from a smart little breast-pocket in the tailor-gown, Mr. Tregonell sauntered across the room to the window where they sat – a Tudor window, with a deep embrasure.
"What are you two talking about in the dark?" he asked, as Dopsy confusedly shuffled the handkerchief back into the breast-pocket. "Something very sentimental, I should think, from the look of you. Poetry, I suppose."
Dopsy said not a word. She believed that Leonard meant well by her – that, if his influence could bring Mr. Hamleigh's nose to the grindstone, to the grindstone that nose would be brought. So she looked up at her brother's friend with a watery smile, and remained mute.
"We were talking about London and the theatres," answered Angus. "Not a very sentimental topic;" and then he got up and walked away with his teacup, to the table near which Christabel was sitting, in the flickering firelight, and seated himself by her side, and began to talk to her about a box of books that had arrived from London that day – books that were familiar to him and new to her. Leonard looked after him with a scowl, safe in the shadow; while Dopsy, feeling that she had made a fool of herself, lapsed again into tears.
"I am afraid he is behaving very badly to you," said Leonard.
"Oh, no, no. But he has such strange ways. He blows hot and cold."
"In plain words, he's a heartless flirt," answered Leonard, impatiently. "He has been fooled by a pack of women – pretends to be dying of consumption – gives himself no end of airs. He has flirted outrageously with you. Has he proposed?"
"No – not exactly," faltered Dopsy.
"Some one ought to bring him to the scratch. Your brother must tackle him."
"Don't you think if – if – Jack were to say anything – were just to hint that I was being made very unhappy – that such marked attentions before all the world put me in a false position – don't you think it might do harm?"
"Quite the contrary. It would do good. No man ought to trifle with a girl's feelings in that way. No man shall be allowed to do it in my house. If Jack won't speak to him, I will."
"Oh, Mr. Vandeleur, what a noble heart you have – what a true friend you have always been to us."
"You are my friend's sister – my wife's guest. I won't see you trifled with."
"And you really think his attentions have been marked?"
"Very much marked. He shall not be permitted to amuse himself at your expense. There he sits, talking sentiment to my wife – just as he has talked sentiment to you. Why doesn't he keep on the safe side, and confine his attentions to married women?"
"You are not jealous of him?" asked Dopsy, with some alarm.
"Jealous! I! It would take a very extraordinary kind of wife, and a very extraordinary kind of admirer of that wife, to make me jealous."
Dopsy felt her hopes in somewise revived by Mr. Tregonell's manner of looking at things. Up to this point she had mistrusted exceedingly that the flirting was all on her side: but now Leonard most distinctly averred that Angus Hamleigh had flirted, and in a manner obvious to every one. And if Mr. Hamleigh really admired her – if he were really blowing hot and cold – inclining one day to make her his wife, and on another day disposed to let her languish and fade in South Belgravia – might not a word or two from a judicious friend turn the scale, and make her happy for life.
She went up to her room to dress in a flutter of hope and fear; so agitated, that she could scarcely manage the more delicate details of her toilet – the drapery of her skirt, the adjustment of the sunflower on her shoulder.
"How flushed and shaky you are," exclaimed Mopsy, pausing in the pencilling of an eyebrow to look at her sister. "Is the deed done? Has he popped?"
"No, he has not popped. But I think he will."
"I wish I were of your opinion. I should like a rich sister. It would be the next best thing to being well off oneself."
"You only think of his money," said Dopsy, who had really fallen in love – for only about the fifteenth time, so there was still freshness in the feeling – "I should care for him just as much if he were a pauper."
"No; you would not," said Mopsy. "I daresay you think you would, but you wouldn't. There is a glamour about money which nobody in our circumstances can resist. A man who dresses perfectly – who has never been hard up – who has always lived among elegant people – there is a style about him that goes straight to one's heart. Don't you remember how in "Peter Wilkins" there are different orders of beings – a superior class – born so, bred so – always apart and above the others. Mr. Hamleigh belongs to that higher order. If he were poor and shabby he would be a different person. You wouldn't care twopence for him."
The Rector of Trevalga and his wife dined at Mount Royal that evening, so Dopsy fell to the lot of Mr. Hamleigh, and had plenty of opportunity of carrying on the siege during dinner, while Mrs. Tregonell and the Rector, who was an enthusiastic antiquarian, talked of the latest discoveries in Druidic remains.
After dinner came the usual adjournment to billiards. The Rector and his wife stayed in the drawing-room with Christabel and Jessie. Mr. Hamleigh would have remained with them, but Leonard specially invited him to the billiard-room.
"You must have had enough Mendelssohn and Beethoven to last you for the next six months," he said. "You had better come and have a smoke with us."
"I could never have too much good music," answered Angus.
"Well, I don't suppose you'd get much to night. The Rector and my wife will talk about pots and pans all the evening, now they've once started. You may as well be sociable, for once-in-a-way, and come with us."
Such an invitation, given in heartiest tones, and with seeming frankness, could hardly be refused. So Angus went across the hall with the rest of the billiard players, to the fine old room, once a chapel, in which there was space enough for settees, and easy chairs, tea-tables, books, flowers, and dogs, without the slightest inconvenience to the players.
"You'll play, Hamleigh?" said Leonard.
"No, thanks; I'd rather sit and smoke and watch you."
"Really! Then Monty and I will play Jack and one of the girls. Billiards is the only game at which one can afford to play against relations – they can't cheat. Mopsy, will you play? Dopsy can mark.'"
"What a thorough good fellow he is," thought Dopsy, charmed with an arrangement which left her comparatively free for flirtation with Mr. Hamleigh, who had taken possession of Christabel's favourite seat – a low capacious basket-chair – by the wide wood fire, and had Christabel's table near him, loaded with her books, and work-basket – those books which were all his favourites as well as hers, and which made an indissoluble link between them. What is mere blood relationship compared with the subtler tie of mutual likings and dislikings?
The men all lighted their cigarettes, and the game progressed with tolerably equal fortunes, Jack Vandeleur playing well enough to make amends for any lack of skill on the part of Mopsy, whose want of the scientific purpose and certainty which come from long experience, was as striking as her dashing and self-assured method of handling her cue, and her free use of all slang terms peculiar to the game. Dopsy oscillated between the marking-board and the fireplace – sometimes kneeling on the Persian rug to play with Randie and the other dogs, sometimes standing in a pensive attitude by the chimney-piece, talking to Angus. All traces of tears were gone. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes brightened by an artful touch of Indian ink under the lashes, her eyebrows accentuated by the same artistic treatment, her large fan held with the true Grosvenor Gallery air.
"Do you believe that peacocks' feathers are unlucky?" she asked, looking pensively at the fringe of green and azure plumage on her fan.
"I am not altogether free from superstition, but my idea of the fates has never taken that particular form. Why should the peacock be a bird of evil omen? I can believe anything bad of the screech-owl or the raven – but the harmless ornamental peacock – surely he is innocent of our woes."
"I have known the most direful calamities follow the introduction of peacocks' feathers into a drawing-room – yet they are so tempting, one can hardly live without them."
"Really! Do you know that I have found existence endurable without so much as a tuft of down from that unmelodious bird?"
"Have you never longed for its plumage to give life and colour to your rooms? – such exquisite colour – such delicious harmony – I wonder that you, who have such artistic taste, can resist the fascination."
"I hope you have not found that pretty fan the cause of many woes?" said Mr. Hamleigh, smilingly, as the damsel posed herself in the early Italian manner, and slowly waved the bright-hued plumage.
"I cannot say that I have been altogether happy since I possessed it," answered Dopsy, with a shy downward glance, and a smothered sigh; "and yet I don't know – I have been only too happy sometimes, perhaps, and at other times deeply wretched."
"Is not that kind of variableness common to our poor human nature – independent of peacocks' feathers?"
"Not to me. I used to be the most thoughtless happy-go-lucky creature."
"Until when?"
"Till I came to Cornwall," with a faint sigh, and a sudden upward glance of a pair of blue eyes which would have been pretty, had they been only innocent of all scheming.
"Then I'm afraid this mixture of sea and mountain air does not agree with you. Too exciting for your nerves perhaps."
"I don't think it is that," with a still fainter sigh.
"Then the peacocks' feathers must be to blame. Why don't you throw your fan into the fire?"
"Not for worlds," said Dopsy.
"Why not?"
"First, because it cost a guinea," naïvely, "and then because it is associated with quite the happiest period of my life."
"You said just now you had been unhappy since you owned it."
"Only by fits and starts. Too utterly happy at other times."
"If I say another word she will dissolve into tears again," thought Angus. "I shall have to leave Mount Royal: a man in weak health is no match for a young woman of this type. She will get me into a corner and declare I have proposed to her."
He got up and went over to the table, where Mr. Montagu was just finishing the game, with a break which had left Dopsy free for flirtation during the last ten minutes.
Mr. Hamleigh played in the next game, but this hardly bettered his condition, for Dopsy now took her sister's place with the cue, and required to be instructed as to every stroke, and even to have her fingers placed in position, now and then by Angus, when the ball was under the cushion, and the stroke in any way difficult. This lengthened the game, and bored Angus exceedingly, besides making him ridiculous in the eyes of the other three men.
"I hate playing with lovers," muttered Leonard, under his breath, when Dopsy was especially worrying about the exact point at which she was to hit the ball for a particular cannon.
"Decidedly I must get away to-morrow," reflected Angus.
The game went on merrily enough, and was only just over when the stable clock struck eleven, at which hour the servants brought in a tray with a tankard of mulled claret for vice, and a siphon for virtue. The Miss Vandeleurs, after pretending to say good-night, were persuaded to sip a little of the hot spiced wine, and were half inclined to accept the cigarettes persuasively offered by Mr. Montagu; till, warned by a wink from Jack, they drew up suddenly, declared they had been quite too awfully dissipated, that they should be too late to wish Mrs. Tregonell good-night, and skipped away.
"Awfully jolly girls, those sisters of yours," said Montagu, as he closed the door which he had opened for the damsels' exit, and strolled back to the hearth, where Angus was sitting dreamily caressing Randie – her dog! How many a happy dog has received caresses charged with the love of his mistress, such mournful kisses as Dido lavished on the young Ascanias in the dead watches of the weary night.
Jack Vandeleur and his host had begun another game, delighted at having the table to themselves.
"Yes, they're nice girls," answered Mr. Vandeleur, without looking off the table; "just the right kind of girls for a country-house: no starch, no prudishness, but as innocent as babies, and as true-hearted – well, they are all heart. I should be sorry to see anybody trifle with either of them. It would be a very serious thing for her – and it should be my business to make it serious for him."
"Great advantage for a girl to have a brother who enjoys the reputation of being a dead shot," said Mr. Montagu, "or it would be if duelling were not an exploded institution – like trial for witchcraft, and hanging for petty larceny."
"Duelling is never out of fashion, among gentlemen," answered Jack, making a cannon and going in off the red. "That makes seventeen, Monty. There are injuries which nothing but the pistol can redress, and I'm not sorry that my Red River experience has made me a pretty good shot. But I'm not half as good as Leonard. He could give me fifty in a hundred any day."
"When a man has to keep his party in butcher's meat by the use of his rifle, he'd need be a decent marksman," answered Mr. Tregonell, carelessly. "I never knew the right use of a gun till I crossed the Rockies. By-the-way, who is for woodcock shooting to-morrow? You'll come, I suppose, Jack?"
"Not to-morrow, thanks. Monty and I are going over to Bodmin to see a man hanged. We've got an order to view, as the house-agents call it. Monty is supposed to be on the Times. I go for the Western Daily Mercury."
"What a horrid ghoulish thing to do," said Leonard.
"It's seeing life," answered Jack, shrugging his shoulders.
"I should call it the other thing. However, as crime is very rare in Cornwall, you may as well make the most of your opportunity. But it's a pity to neglect the birds. This is one of the best seasons we've had since 1860, when there was a remarkable flight of birds in the second week in October. But even that year wasn't as good as '55, when a farmer at St. Buryan killed close upon sixty birds in a week. You'll go to-morrow, I hope, Mr. Hamleigh? There's some very good ground about St. Nectan's Kieve, and it's a picturesque sort of place, that will just hit your fancy."
"I have been to the Kieve, often – yes, it is a lovely spot," answered Angus, remembering his first visit to Mount Royal, and the golden afternoons which he had spent with Christabel among the rocks and the ferns, their low voices half drowned by the noise of the waterfall. "But I shan't be able to shoot to-morrow. I have just been making up my mind to tear myself away from Mount Royal, and I was going to ask you to let one of your grooms drive me over to Launceston in time for the mid-day train. I can get up from Plymouth by the Limited Mail."
"Why are you in such a hurry?" asked Leonard. "I thought you were rather enjoying yourself with us."
"So much so that as far as my own inclination goes there is no reason why I should not stay here for the rest of my life – only you would get tired of me – and I have promised my doctor to go southward before the frosty weather begins."
"A day or two can't make much difference."
"Not much – only when there is a disagreeable effort to be made the sooner one gets it over the better."
"I am sorry you are off so suddenly," said Leonard, going on with the game, and looking rather oddly across the table at Captain Vandeleur.
"I am more than sorry," said that gentleman, "I am surprised. But perhaps I am not altogether in the secret of your movements."
"There is no secret," said Angus.
"Isn't there? Then I'm considerably mistaken. It has looked very much lately as if there were a particular understanding between you and my elder sister; and I think, as her brother, I have some right to be let into the secret before you leave Mount Royal."
"I am sorry that either my manner, or Miss Vandeleur's, should have so far misled you," answered Angus, with freezing gravity. He pitied the sister, but felt only cold contempt for the brother. "The young lady and I have never interchanged a word which might not have been heard by everybody at Mount Royal."
"And you have had no serious intentions – you have never pretended to any serious feeling about her."
"Never. Charming as the young lady may be, I have been, and am, adamant against all such fascinations. A man who has been told that he may not live a year is hardly in a position to make an offer of marriage. Good-night, Tregonell. I shall rely on your letting one of your men drive me to the station."
