Tiny Luttrell Part 5

The young man blushed afresh.

"Fancy your remembering! Unfortunately it wasn't my match, though; my day out was against Winchester."

"Oh, yes," said Tiny, less knowingly.

"And how are you, Miss Luttrell?"

This had been forgotten, Tiny reported well of herself. Her friend hesitated; there was some nervousness in his manner, but his good eyes never fell from her face, and presently he exclaimed, as though the idea had just struck him:

"I say, mayn't I have this dance, Miss Luttrell--what's left of it?"

"Thanks, I'm afraid I'm engaged for it."

"Then mayn't I find your partner for you?"

Now this second request, or his anxious way of making it, was an elaborate revelation to Christina, and wrote itself in her brain. "Do you remember Herbert?" she, however, simply replied. "He is the culprit."

"Your brother? Certainly I remember him. I saw him a few minutes ago, and made sure I had seen him somewhere before; but he looks older. I don't fancy he's dancing. He's somewhere or other with somebody in red."

"So I hear."

"Then mayn't I have a turn with you before it stops?"

She hesitated as long as he had hesitated before first asking her; there was not time to hesitate longer. Then she took his arm, and they pa.s.sed through a narrow avenue of ferns and flowers, round a corner, up some steps, and so into the ball room.

The waltz was indeed half over, but the second half of it Christina and her fortuitous partner danced together, without a rest, and also without a word. He led her a more enterprising measure than those previous partners who had questioned her concerning Australia. The name of Australia had not crossed this one's lips. As Tiny whirled and glided on his arm she saw a good many eyes upon her: they made her dance her best; and her best was the best in the room, though her partner was uncommonly good, and they had danced together before. Among the eyes were Ruth's, and they were beaming; the others were mostly inquisitive, and as strange to Christina as she evidently was to them; but once a turn brought her face to face with Herbert, on his way from the conservatory, and alone. He was a lanky, brown-faced, hook-nosed boy, with wiry limbs and an aggressive eye, and he followed his sister round the room with a stare of which she was uncomfortably conscious. He had looked for her too late, when forced to relinquish the girl in red to her proper partner, who still seemed put out. Christina was put out also, by her brother's look, but she did not show it.

"You are staying in town?" her partner said after the dance as they sat together in the conservatory, but not in the old corner.

"Yes, with my sister, Mrs. Holland; you never met her, I think. We are in town till August."

"Where do you go then?"

"To the country for a month. My sister and her husband have taken a country rectory for the whole of August. They had it last year, and liked the place so much that they have taken it again; it is a little village called Essingham."

"Essingham!" cried Christina's partner.

"Yes; do you know it?"

"I know of it," answered the young man. "I suppose you will go on the Continent after that?" he added quickly.

"Well, hardly; my brother-in-law has so little time; but he expects to have to go to Lisbon on business at the end of October, and he has promised to take us with him."

"To Lisbon at the end of October," repeated Tiny's friend reflectively.

"Get him to take you to Cintra. They say it's well worth seeing."

Yet another dance was beginning. Christina was interested in the movements of a young man in spectacles, who was plainly in search of somebody. "He's hunting for me," she whispered to her companion, who was saying:

"Portugal's rather the knuckle end of Europe, don't you think? But I've heard Cintra well spoken of. I should go there if I were you."

"We intend to. Do you mind pulling that young man's coat tails? He has forgotten my face."

"Yes, I do mind," said Tiny's partner with unexpected earnestness. "I may meet you again, but I should like to take this opportunity of explaining----"

Tiny Luttrell was smiling in his face.

"I hate explanations!" she cried. "They are an insult to one's imagination, and I much prefer to accept things without them." There was a gleam in her smile, but as she spoke she flashed it upon the spectacles of her blind pursuer, who was squaring his arm to her in an instant.

And that was the last she saw of the only partner for whom she had a good word afterward, and he had come to her by accident. But it was by no means the last she heard of him. The next was from Herbert, as they drove home together in one hansom, while Ruth and her husband followed in another. The morning air blew fresh upon their faces; the rising sun struck sparks from the harness; the leaves in the park were greener than any in Australia, and the dew on the gra.s.s through the railings was as a silver shower new-fallen. But the most delicious taste of London that had yet been given her was poisoned for Christina by her brother Herbert.

"To have my claim jumped by that joker!" said he through his nose.

"But you had left it empty," said Tiny mildly. "I was all alone."

"It isn't so much that," her brother said, s.h.i.+fting the ground he had taken in preliminary charges; "it's your dancing with that brute Manister!"

"My dear old Herbs," said Miss Luttrell with provoking coolness, "Lord Manister asked me to dance with him, and I didn't see why I should refuse. I certainly didn't see why I should consult you, Herbs."

"By ghost," cried Herbert, "if it comes to that, he once asked you to marry him!"

"Now you are a treat," said the girl, before the blood came.

"And then bolted! I should be ashamed of myself for dancing with him if I were you. He said I was a larrikin, too. I'd like to fill his eye for him!"

"He'll never say a truer thing!" Christina cried out; but her voice broke over the words, and the early sun cut diamonds on her lashes.

Now this was Herbert: he was rough, but not cowardly. His nose had become hooked in his teens from a stand-up fight with a full-grown man.

There is not the least doubt that in such a combat with Lord Manister that n.o.bleman, though otherwise a finer athlete, would have suffered extremely. But it was not in Herbert to hit any woman in cold blood with his tongue. Having done this in his heat to Christina, his mate, he was man enough to be sorry and ashamed, and to slip her hands into his.

"I'm an awful beast," he stammered out. "I didn't mean anything at all--except that I'd like to fill up Manister's eye! I can't go back on that when--when he called me a larrikin!"

CHAPTER IV.

RUTH AND CHRISTINA.

Here is the difference between Ruth and Christina, who were considered so much alike.

Of the two, Ruth was the one to fall in love with at sight--of which Erskine Holland supplies the proof. She was less diminutive than her sister; she had a finer figure, a warmer color, and indeed, despite the destructive Australian sun, a very beautiful complexion. In the early days at Wallandoon she had given herself a better chance in this respect than Christina had done, not from vanity at all, but rather owing to certain differences in their ideas of pleasure, into which it is needless to enter. The result was her complexion; and this was not her only beauty, for she had good brown eyes that suited her coloring as autumn leaves befit an autumn sunset. These eyes are never unkind, but Ruth's were sweet-tempered to a fault. So the glance of one scanning both girls for the first time rested naturally upon Ruth, but on all subsequent occasions it flew straight to Christina, because there was an end to Ruth; but there was no coming to an end of Tiny, about whom there was ever some fresh thing to charm or disappoint one.

Thus, but for the businesslike dispatch of Erskine Holland, it might have been Ruth's fate to break in Christina's admirers until Christina fancied one of them enough to marry him. For Ruth's was perhaps the more unselfish character of the two, as it was certainly the simpler one, in spite of a peculiar secretive strain in her from which Tiny was free.

Tiny, on the other hand, was much more sensitive; but to perceive this was to understand her better than she understood herself. For she did not know her own weaknesses as the self-examining know theirs, and hardly anybody suspected her of this one until her arrival in England--when Erskine Holland came to treat her as a sister, and to understand her more or less.

In Australia he had seen very little of her, though enough to regard her at the time as an arrant little heartless flirt, for whom sighed silly swains innumerable. That she was, indeed, a flirt there was still no denying; but as his knowledge of her ripened, Holland was glad to unharness the opprobrious epithets with which Ruth's sister had first driven herself into his mind. He discovered good points in Christina, and among them a humor which he had never detected out in Australia.

Probably his own sense of it had lost its edge out there, for love-making blunts nothing sooner; while Ruth, for her part, was naturally wanting in humor. Holland had never been blind to this defect in his wife, but he seemed resigned to it; one can conceive it to be a merit in the wife of an amusing man.