Molly sat staring out across the garden. At first every word had been a stab. Several times she had been on the point of crying out that she could bear it no longer, but gradually a numbness succeeded the pain. She found herself listening apathetically.
McEachern talked on. He left the subject of Jimmy, comfortably conscious that, even if there had ever existed in Molly’s heart any budding feeling of the kind he had suspected, it must now be dead. He steered the conversation away until it ran easily among commonplaces. He talked of New York, of the preparations for the theatricals. Molly answered composedly. She was still pale, and a certain listlessness in her manner might have been noticed by a more observant man than Mr. McEachern. Beyond that there was nothing to show that her heart had been born and killed but a few minutes before. Women have the Red Indian instinct; and Molly had grown to womanhood in those few minutes.
Presently Lord Dreever’s name came up.
It caused a momentary pause, and McEachern took advantage of it. It was the cue for which he had been waiting.
He hesitated for a moment, for the conversation was about to enter upon a difficult phase, and he was not quite sure of himself.
Then he took the plunge.
“I have just been talking to Sir Thomas, my dear,” he said. He tried to speak casually, and as a natural result infused so much meaning into his voice that Molly looked at him in surprise. McEachern coughed confusedly. Diplomacy, he concluded, was not his forte. He abandoned it in favour of directness.
“He was telling me that you had refused Lord Dreever this evening.”
“Yes, I did,” said Molly. “How did Sir Thomas know?”
“Lord Dreever told him.”
Molly raised her eyebrows.
“I shouldn’t have thought it was the sort of thing he would talk about,” she said.
“Sir Thomas is his uncle.”
“Of course. So he is,” said Molly dryly. “I forgot. That would account for it, wouldn’t it?”
Mr. McEachern looked at her with some concern. There was a hard ring in her voice which he did not altogether like. His greatest admirer had never called him an intuitive man, and he was quite at a loss to see what was wrong. As a schemer he was perhaps a little naive. He had taken it for granted that Molly was ignorant of the manoeuvres which had been going on, and which had culminated that afternoon in a stammering proposal of marriage from Lord Dreever in the rose garden. This, however, was not the case. The woman incapable of seeing through the machinations of two men of the mental calibre of Sir Thomas Blunt and Mr. McEachern has yet to be born. For some considerable time Molly had been alive to the well-meant plottings of that worthy pair, and had derived little pleasure from the fact. It may be that woman loves to be pursued, but she does not love to be pursued by a crowd.
Mr. McEachern cleared his throat and began again.
“You shouldn’t decide a question like that too hastily, my dear.”
“I didn’t—not too hastily for Lord Dreever, at any rate, poor dear.”
“It was in your power,” said Mr. McEachern portentously, “to make a man happy.”
“I did,” said Molly, bitterly. “You should have seen his face light up. He could hardly believe it was true for a moment, and then it came home to him, and I thought he would have fallen on my neck. He did his very best to look heartbroken—out of politeness—but it was no good. He whistled most of the way back to the house—all flat, but very cheerfully.”
“My dear! What do you mean?”
Molly had made the discovery earlier in their conversation that her father had moods whose existence she had not suspected. It was his turn now to make a similar discovery regarding herself.
“I mean nothing, father,” she said. “I’m just telling you what happened. He came to me looking like a dog that’s going to be washed—”
“Why, of course; he was nervous, my dear.”
“Of course. He couldn’t know that I was going to refuse him.”
She was breathing quickly. He started to speak, but she went on looking straight before her. Her face was very white in the moonlight.
“He took me into the rose garden. Was that Sir Thomas’s idea? There couldn’t have been a better setting, I’m sure—the roses looked lovely. Presently I heard him gulp, and I was so sorry for him. I would have refused him then, and put him out of his misery, only I couldn’t very well till he had proposed, could I? So I turned my back and sniffed at a rose, and then he shut his eyes—I couldn’t see him, but I knew he shut his eyes—and began to say his lesson.”
“Molly!”
“He did—he said his lesson. He gabbled it. When he had got as far as ‘Well don’t you know, what I mean is, that’s what I wanted to say, you know,’ I turned round and soothed him. I said, I didn’t love him. He said, ‘No, no, of course not.’ I said he had paid me a great compliment. He said, ‘Not at all,’ looking very anxious, poor darling, as if even then he was afraid of what might come next. But I reassured him,
