Rupert's proposal was just what I was hoping for. I responded most
cordially, feeling half ashamed of my real motive for so doing when I
saw the unmistakable gratification in his eyes. So I resolved to do my
best--but a small "best" at most--to help him, especially when, on
following him to the library, I saw the little preparations he had
already made there for my comfort, which he was half anxious, half shy
about.
The season was still early enough in the year for the weather to be very
uncertain, if indeed in this so-called "temperate" zone of ours it is
ever anything else. It was chilly enough to make a little fire
acceptable, particularly in the large book-lined room with its heavy
furniture and hangings and northern aspect. And to this my young host
had seen. The flames danced merrily upwards, and a small table and
eminently comfortable leathern arm-chair were drawn up at one side of
the hearth.
"Now," said Rupert, as he stooped for a footstool,--"now, Miss
Fitzmaurice, make yourself thoroughly comfortable if you can, so as the
better to bear the victimising before you."
"Nonsense!" I said, laughing. "I don't feel the least like a victim;
still less, however, like a judge! I shall just think you are giving me
a pleasant morning's entertainment. But first, before we settle down,
let me make a little tour of the room. New rooms, as well as new places
of every kind, interest me," and I strolled round, glancing up at the
shelves, and here and there stopping to read the title of one of the
well-bound, mostly venerable-looking volumes.
"It is an ugly old room," said Rupert. "You see, my people don't go in
for modernising in any way. But still I think there is a charm about
these gloomy, stately old London rooms."
"Of course there is," I replied, for though the new order of things as
to house decoration and so on was in its earliest infancy, on that very
account perhaps its crudities were already frequently visible and
jarring. "I love a room which you _feel_ has been the same for more
than one generation. Whose corner is that?" I went on, as I perceived
a neat, not ugly, but very business-like writing-table with chair to
match, in a nook facing the book-shelves, and near one of the windows.
"Yours?"
"No," Rupert replied. "That is where Clarence writes when he has to
bring work home, as sometimes happens. Mother doesn't approve of our
sitting up in our own rooms. She never has allowed it--she's afraid of
our falling asleep and setting fire to the house, though I don't see
that the risk isn't pretty much the same downstairs as well as
upstairs."
"Oh, I don't know that," I said; "it would take a good deal to make
_these_ burn," and I touched the thick woollen draperies of the window
as I spoke. Half unconsciously I had moved a little nearer to the
writing-table, and the postmark of a large bluish-coloured envelope
caught my eyes, which, as I have said, are, or at least were, in those
days very quick. It was that of "Millflowers." I felt myself blush,
though I am quite sure Rupert did not notice it; indeed the room was too
dusky for him to have done so, and a feeling of annoyance went through
me. "I seem fated to do mean things," I thought. "Eavesdropping, and
now reading what I have no right to see," though, after all, the word I
had noticed did no more than confirm what I was already instinctively
convinced of--that the Paynes were the legal advisers of the Grimsthorpe
family.