“Now, do you mean to tell me,” he says in low earnest tones, and still retaining his hold on her hand, “that you have forgotten all about the letter I sent to you a short time ago, and which you have never condescended to answer?”
Lettice is flushing and nervous now, but still puts a brave face on the matter.
“Oh no, I”—with marked emphasis—“haven’t forgotten it, but I thought you had.”
“What could make you imagine such a thing?” asks the doctor in downright sober earnest.
“Because,” and here by a dexterous movement she releases her hand, “you never spoke about it after you had sent it, and I naturally thought you had forgotten it.”
Dr. Herron bites his lip to keep back his own smiles now.
“Will you never give over fun and teasing, Lettice?” he says. “But now you can answer me—one little word will do,” and again somehow he gets possession of the hand, and his face is very close to hers.
Lettice looks down on the gravel-path, unconquered still.
“Please let me go, Dr. Herron. Let it be till I return from London. I couldn’t tie you down with any promises, you know. I’m quite sure you will have altered your mind by the time I come back, and I’ll really take your letter up to town with me, and—and—and”—here she hesitates and stumbles and picks herself up again, shakes her hair over her eyes, and compels the doctor to release her hand so that she may fasten it back again, and then looking a little sideways at him, completes her sentence—“and take great, great care of it. Goodbye, Dr. Herron.” And she is gone.
And Dr. Herron, looking after her as she flutters across the sunlit lawn and disappears under the grey stone portico of the old house, wonders whether in any corner under heaven there ever existed, or could exist, so sweet and fascinating, and withal so wilful and untamed, a being as Lettice Tremarten.
II
Among Crows
As Lettice anticipated, she had little or no difficulty in persuading her father that at least one season in London was an absolute necessity in every girl’s life.
“You know, dear,” she exclaimed, when “talking the matter over” with him, “I feel quite ashamed when I have to tell people I have never seen the parks nor been to the Opera, nor, what is worst of all, kissed the Queen’s hand. It is really quite too dreadful. And Marian Goodlake, when she came over from Aberystwyth on her wedding tour, said ‘I had grown to look quite rustic.’ And Aunt Rosamond, every time she comes, tells me I am ‘so unsophisticated.’ And you know, papa, that means a great deal. Don’t you remember you called Betsy Williams ‘unsophisticated’ the other day when she went up to London to receive the twenty pound legacy that had been left to her, and she took the lawyer’s cheque to Drummond’s and told one of the clerks that she ‘didn’t want to inconvenience him by taking so much money at once, but she’d have a little at a time as it suited him?’ And some day, papa, I shall be doing something like that, and then you’ll be ashamed of me and be very, very sorry that you didn’t let me go to London with Aunt Rosamond.”
Lettice paused for breath. Papa smiled.
“I suppose, pussy, it must be,” he said. “I knew some day you’d have to go, but I didn’t think ‘some day’ was so near at hand. In fact, you seemed to me still a child in short petticoats till the other day I was startled out of my belief by Dr. Herron—”
“There is that dreadful Brownie after the squirrels again,” interrupted Lettice, and, utterly regardless of Aunt Judith’s neuralgia, she flung back the drawing-room window and started in full pursuit of the dog.
Mr. Tremarten quietly got up and closed it after her.
“Who is this Dr. Herron that we see and hear so much of?” asked Aunt Rosamond as Lettice disappeared among the shrubs and brushwood.
“He is the son of that Colonel Herron who died in Burma some ten years ago,” replied Mr. Tremarten. “His uncle, Sir Wilfrid Herron, of Herron Court, in Northampton, is the head of the family, and in due course the title and estates must descend to our friend the doctor here. Sir Wilfrid, however, has never shown the least kindness towards his brother’s children—their mother jilted him in early life, I believe. Colonel Herron somehow managed to run through whatever fortune he and his wife had, and our Dr. John prefers working at a profession he has always liked, to support himself and sister, instead of hanging about doing nothing and waiting for dead men’s shoes. An eccentric individual, no doubt, he seems to you, Rosamond,” he added after a pause.
“Not half so eccentric an individual as you seem to me, Owen,” retorted the sister. “The want of common sense you have shown in the bringing up of that daughter of yours is to me marvellous. Not content with burying her for the first eighteen years of her life in absolutely conventual seclusion, with birds, and dogs, and horses as her sole companions, you throw her into the society of an attractive—yes, certainly attractive—but most ineligible bachelor, and what do you expect will come of it, let me ask you?”
Owen winced a little at this allusion to the secluded life he had chosen to lead ever since the death of his young wife within a year of their marriage. However, he replied calmly enough—
“Something has come of it already, Rosamond, at least as far as the doctor is concerned, for about a month since he applied to me for permission to make Lettice an offer of marriage, and I told him he had my best wishes for his success.”
Aunt Rosamond flushed crimson with anger.
“Now, Judith, did you ever hear of such a piece of folly?” she exclaimed, turning to her sister. “Owen, do you really know what you are doing? Have
