"Oh, looks!"
"It's what we're talking about, isn't it? It's what makes the
difference. I shall figure as a cad."
He spoke as one who makes an astounding discovery. She was inexpressibly
shocked.
"Oh, but you couldn't," was all she could find to say, but she said it
with conviction.
[Illustration: "THERE'S NO ONE WHO WON'T BELIEVE BUT THAT I--THREW YOU
OVER."]
He laughed again. "You'll see. There's no one--not my best friends--not
my mother--not my sisters--who won't believe--whatever you and I may say
to the contrary--who won't believe but that I--threw you over."
A toss of his hand, a snap of his fingers, suited the action to the
word.
Her color came and went in little shifting flashes. She moved a pace or
two aimlessly, restively. Her head went high, her chin tilted. When she
spoke her voice trembled with indignation, but she only said:
"They couldn't believe it long."
"Oh, couldn't they! The story would follow me to my grave. Things like
that are never forgotten among fellows so intimate as soldiers. There
was a chap in our regiment who jilted a nice girl at the Cape--sailed
for home secretly only a week before the wedding." He paused to let her
take in the dastardly nature of the flight. "Well, he rejoined at the
dépôt. He stayed--but he didn't stay long. The Rangers got too hot for
him--or too cold. The last I ever heard of him he was giving English
lessons at Boulogne."
The flagrancy of the case gave her an advantage. "It's idle to think
that that kind of fate could overtake you."
"The fate that can overtake me easily enough is that as long as I live
they'll say I chucked a girl because she'd had bad luck."
She was about to reply when the click of the latch of the gate diverted
her attention. Drusilla Fane, attended by Davenant, was coming up the
hill. Seeing Olivia and Ashley at the end of the lawn, Drusilla
deflected her course across the grass, Davenant in her wake. Her wide,
frank smile was visible from a long way off.
"This is not indiscretion," she laughed, as she advanced; "neither is it
vulgar curiosity to see the lion. I shouldn't have come at all if mother
hadn't sent me with a message."
Wearing a large hat _à la_ Princesse de Lamballe and carrying a
long-handled sunshade which she held daintily, like a Watteau
shepherdess holding a crook, Drusilla had an air of refined,
eighteenth-century dash. Knowing the probability that she disturbed some
poignant bit of conversation, she proceeded to take command, stepping up
to Olivia with a hasty kiss. "Hello, you dear thing!" Turning to Ashley,
she surveyed him an instant before offering her hand. "So you've got
here! How fit you look! What sort of trip did you have, and how did you
leave your people? And, oh, by the way, this is Mr. Davenant."
Davenant, who had been paying his respects to Miss Guion, charged
forward, with hand outstretched and hearty: "Happy to meet you, Colonel.
Glad to welcome you to our country."
"Oh!"
Ashley snapped out the monosyllable in a dry, metallic voice pitched
higher than his usual key. The English softening of the vowel sound, so
droll to the American ear, was also more pronounced than was customary
in his speech, so that the exclamation became a sharp "A-ow!"
Feeling his greeting to have been insufficient, Davenant continued,
pumping up a forced rough-and-ready cordiality. "Heard so much about
you, Colonel, that you seem like an old friend. Hope you'll like us.
Hope you'll enjoy your stay."
"Oh, indeed? I don't know, I'm sure."
Ashley's glance shifted from Drusilla to Olivia as though asking in some
alarm who was this exuberant bumpkin in his Sunday clothes who had
dropped from nowhere. Davenant drew back; his face fell. He looked like
a big, sensitive dog hurt by a rebuff. It was Mrs. Fane who came to the
rescue.
"Peter's come to see Cousin Henry. They've got business to talk over.
And mother wants to know if you and Colonel Ashley won't come to dinner
to-morrow evening. That's my errand. Just ourselves, you know. It'll be
very quiet."
Olivia recovered somewhat from the agitation of the previous half-hour
as well as from the movement of sudden, inexplicable anger which
Ashley's reception of Davenant had produced in her. Even so she could
speak but coldly, and, as it were, from a long way off.
"You'll go," she said, turning to Ashley, "and I'll come if I can leave
papa. I'll run up flow and see how he is and take Mr. Davenant with me."