Rossmoyne Part 36

"If one is hot or tired, yes."

"You are one of the most grateful specimen of your s.e.x. I wish there was anything for which you might be grateful to me. But I am not great at the _pet.i.ts soins_ business."

"I shouldn't have thought so this afternoon," says Monica, maliciously, "when you were happy with Olga Bohun. But see, the moon has risen quite above the elms. I must go."

"Not yet. There is something else. When am I to see you again?--when?"

"That is as fate wills it."

"_You_ are my fate. Will it, then, and say to-morrow."

"No, no!" exclaims she, releasing her hands from his, "I cannot indeed.

I _must_ not. In being here with you now I am doing wrong, and am betraying the two people in the world who are most kind to me. How shall I look into their eyes to-morrow? No; I will not promise to meet you anywhere--_ever_."

"How tender you are with them, and with me how cruel!"

"You have many joys in your life, but they how few!"

"You are wrong there. The world has grown useless to me since I met you.

You are my one joy, and you elude me; therefore pity me too."

"Who made you so gracious a courtier?" asks she, with a little shrug of her rounded shoulders.

"Now you cast scorn upon me," says Desmond, half angrily, and as he says it the thought of Kit's word _flout_ comes to her, and she smiles. It is an idle thought, yet it is with difficulty she cleaves to the less offensive smiles and keeps herself from laughing aloud.

"Why should I do that?" she says, a little saucily. Indeed, she knows this young man to be so utterly in her power--and power is so sweet when first acquired, and so p.r.o.ne to breed tyranny--that she hardly turns aside to meditate upon the pain she may be causing him.

"I don't know," a little sadly; then, "Monica, you like me?"

"Yes, I like you," says Miss Beresford, as she might have answered had she been questioned as to her opinion of an aromatic russet.

Repressing a gesture of impatience, Desmond goes on calmly,--

"Better than Ryde?"

"Than Mr. Ryde?" She stops and glances at the gravel at her feet in a would-be thoughtful fas.h.i.+on, and pushes it to and fro with her pretty Louis Quinze shoe. She pauses purposely, and makes quite an affair of her hesitation.

"Yes, Ryde," says he, impatiently.

"How can I answer that?" she says, at length, with studied deliberation, "when I know so little of either him--or you?"

His indignation increases.

"Knowing us both at _least_ equally well, you must have formed by this time some opinion of us."

"I should indeed," says the young girl, slowly, always with her eyes upon the gravel; "but unfortunately it never occurred to me,--the vital necessity of doing so, I mean."

Though her head is still bent, he can detect the little amused smile that is curving her mobile lips. There can be small doubt but that she is enjoying his discomfiture immensely.

"Certainly there is no reason why _you_ should waste a thought on either him or me," he returns, stiffly.

"No; and yet I do waste one on--_you_--sometimes," says she, with a gleam of tenderness, and a swift glance from under her long lashes that somehow angers him intensely.

"You are a coquette," he says, quietly. There is contempt both in his look and tone. As she hears it, she suddenly lifts her head, and, without betraying chagrin, regards him steadfastly.

"Is that so?" she says. "Sometimes I have _thought_ it, but----"

The unmistakable hope her pause contains angers him afresh.

"If you covet the unenviable t.i.tle," he says, bitterly, "be happy. You can lay just claim to it. You are more than worthy of it."

"You flatter me," she says, letting a glance so light rest upon him that it seems but the mere quiver of her eyelids.

"I meant no flattery, believe me."

"I do believe you: I quite understand."

"Not quite, I think," exclaims he, the sudden coldness of her manner frightening him into better behavior. "If--if I have said anything to offend you, I ask your forgiveness."

"There is nothing to forgive, indeed, and you have failed to offend me.

But," slowly, "you have made me very sorry for you."

"_Sorry?_"

"Yes, for your most unhappy temper. It is quite the worst, I think, I have ever met with. _Good_-night Mr. Desmond: pray be careful when going through that hedge again; there are some rose-trees growing in it, and thorns do hurt so dreadfully."

So saying, she gathers up her white skirts, and, without a touch of her hand, or even a last glance, flits like a lissome ghost across the moonlit paths of the garden, and so is gone.

CHAPTER XIII.

How Kit reads between the lines--How the Misses Blake show themselves determined to pursue a dissipated course, and how Monica is led astray by an apt pupil of Machiavelli.

Early next morning Bridget, Monica's maid, enters Kit's room in a somewhat mysterious fas.h.i.+on. Glancing all round the room furtively, as though expecting an enemy lying in ambush behind every chair and table, she says, in a low, cautious tone,--

"A letter for you, miss."

As she says this, she draws a note from beneath her ap.r.o.n, where, in her right hand, it has been carefully hidden,--_so_ carefully, indeed, that she could not have failed to create suspicion in the breast of a babe.

"For me," says Kit, off her guard for once.

"Yes, miss."

"Who brought it?"