He took the hand she stretched out to him, and kissed it, saying in a rallying voice: “But you will be constantly seeing me, you little pea-goose! We are to be neighbours!”

“As to that,” said Mr Steane haughtily, “I have by no means decided to give my consent to this marriage. I shall require Mr Nethercott to satisfy me as to his ability to support my daughter in a manner befitting her breeding.”

Mr Nethercott, already in the doorway with his fair burden, paused to say with unruffled composure that he would do himself the honour of laying before his prospective father-in-law all the relevant facts concerning his birth, fortune, and situation in life as soon as he had carried Cherry up to her room. He than continued on his purposeful way, preceded by Henrietta, and telling his betrothed, very kindly, to hush, when she attempted to argue that her marriage had nothing whatsoever to do with her father.

The Viscount shut the door, and strolled back to his chair, regarding Mr Steane with a pronounced twinkle in his eyes. “You are to be congratulated, Mr Steane,” he said. “Your daughter is making a very creditable marriage, and you need never suffer pangs of anxiety about her again.”

“There is that, of course,” acknowledged Mr Steane heavily. “But when I think of the plans I have been making for years—I should have known better! All my life, Desford, I have been quite the dregs of my family as to luck. It disheartens a man! There’s no denying that!” He turned his jaundiced gaze upon the Viscount, and added: “Not that you know anything about it! You seem to me to have the devil’s own luck! Well, consider what has happened this day! You wouldn’t have braced it though if this fellow, Nethercott, hadn’t dropped out of the sky like a honey-fall for you!”

“Oh, yes, I should!” said the Viscount. “Not to use words with the bark on them, your intention was to bludgeon me into marrying Cherry, but you chose the wrong man, Steane: there was never the least hope of buttoning that scheme up!”

“I abandoned all thought of your marrying Cherry when I learned of your betrothal,” Mr Steane replied. “Never shall it be said of me that I wrecked the happiness of an innocent female—however deluded she may be! But I fancy, my lord, you’d have come down handsomely to keep this scandalous business quiet! Or, at any hand, that stiff-necked father of yours would!”

“From what I know of my stiff-necked father, Mr Steane, I think he would have been far more likely to have driven you out of the country.”

“Well, it’s a waste of time to discuss the matter!” said Mr Steane irritably.

“Of course it is! Consider instead how much cause you have to be thankful that your only daughter has had the good fortune to become attached to a man who will certainly make her an admirable husband!”

“My only daughter! She’s another disappointment! There’s no end to them. I had hopes of her when she was a child: seemed to be a bright, coming little thing. She could have been very useful to me.”

“In what way?” asked Desford curiously.

“Oh, many ways!” said Mr Steane. “I hoped she might act as hostess in the establishment I have set up in Paris, but I saw at a glance that she’s too like her mother. Pretty enough, but not up to snuff. Wouldn’t know how to go on at all. A pity! Sheer waste of my time and blunt to have come to England.”

Since he seemed to be slipping rapidly into a maudlin frame of mind, the Viscount was relieved to see Mr Nethercott come back into the room. He was accompanied by Henrietta, and it was immediately plain to the Viscount that it was she who had prompted him to suggest to Mr Steane that it would be more convenient to discuss such matters as Settlements at Marley House.

“I think that an excellent notion!” she said warmly. “You will wish to inspect Cherry’s future home, I expect, Mr Steane. And if you care to visit her tomorrow, Mr Nethercott has been kind enough to say that he will be happy to put you up for the night!”

“I am obliged to you, sir,” said Mr Steane, reverting to his grand manner. “I shall be happy to avail myself of your hospitality—but without prejudice, understand!” He then took a punctilious leave of Henrietta, bowed stiffly to the Viscount, and allowed himself to be ushered out of the room by the impassive Mr Nethercott.

“You unprincipled woman!” said the Viscount, when the door was fairly shut behind the departing visitors. “You should be ashamed of yourself! Saddling the unfortunate man with that old rumstick!”

“Oh, did you guess it was my doing?” she said, breaking into pent-up laughter.

“Guess!” he said scornfully. “I knew it the instant you came in looking as demure as a nun’s hen!”

“Oh, no, did I? But I had to get rid of him, Des, or Mama would have taken to her bed! What with thinking Charlie had eloped with Cherry, and then hearing that Wilfred Steane was on his way to visit us, she’s been having spasms, and vapours, and every sort of ache and ill, and is now in the worst of ill-humours! I shall have to go to her, or she will fall utterly into the hips. But before I do go, tell me what you feel about this astonishing betrothal! Will it do, or is he too old for her? I’ve noticed that she seems to prefer old men, but—”

“Never mind what I think! What do you think, Hetta?”

“How can I say? I think she is so amiable, and sweet-tempered, that she will be happy, as long as he is kind to her. As for him, he seems to be extremely fond of her, so perhaps he won’t find her a trifle boring.”

“Fond of her! He must be nutty on her to be willing to marry her now that he’s seen her father!”

She laughed. “You know, Des, I didn’t think he could be as bad as people say, but he’s worse! If he weren’t such a funny one I couldn’t have borne to sit there listening to him! But when I was discussing her prospects with Mr Nethercott one day, he said that her parentage ought not to weigh against her in the mind of a man who fell in love with her. So I daresay he won’t think her father worth a moment’s consideration!”

“Hetta, tell me the truth! Has it hurt you?” he asked bluntly.

“Good God, no! Though it has sadly lowered my crest, I own! I was vain enough to think that he came here to visit me, not Cherry!”

“When I first met him, dangling after you, none of us had ever heard of Cherry,” he reminded her.

“I might have known you’d roast me for having been cut out by Cherry! What an odious creature you are, Des!” she said affably. “By the by, do you and Simon mean to spend the night at Wolversham? I wish I might invite you both to dine with us; but I daren’t! Mama has taken you in the most violent dislike, for having foisted Cherry on to us, and she never wants to see the face of a Carrington again! So for the present I must say goodbye to you!”

“Just a moment before you do that!” he said. “You and I, my pippin, have still something to discuss!”

He spoke lightly, but the smile had vanished from his eyes, which were fixed on her face with a look in them that made her feel, for the first time in all their dealings, as shy as a schoolgirl. She said hurriedly: “Oh, you refer, I collect, to that nonsensical story Simon made up about us! I must say I was excessively vexed with him, but I don’t think any harm will come of it! Simon says that if it does leak out that we are secretly engaged we have only to deny it, or for one or other of us to cry off.” He returned no answer, and when she ventured to steal a look at him she found that he was still watching her intently. In an attempt to relieve what, for some inscrutable reason, she felt to be an embarrassing situation, she said, with a very creditable assumption of her usual liveliness: “If it comes to that, I collect the task of crying off will be mine! I can never understand why it is thought very improper for a gentleman to cry off an engagement, but no such thing if the lady does it!”

“No,” he agreed, but not as if he had been attending to her. “I give you fair warning, Hetta, that if it does come to that the task will be yours, for I have not the most remote intention—or desire—to cry off.” He paused for an instant, trying to read her face, but when she lifted her eyes, as though compelled, to his, his mouth twisted, and he said in a voice she had never heard before: “But you shan’t! I won’t let you! Oh, Hetta, my dear pippin, I’ve been such a fool! I’ve loved you all my life, and never knew how much until I thought I was going to lose you! Don’t say it’s too late!”

A tiny smile wavered on her lips. She said simply: “No, Des. N-not if you really mean it!”

“I never meant anything more in my life!” he said, and went to her, holding out his arms. She walked straight into them, and they closed tightly round her. “My best of friends!” he said huskily, and kissed her.

This idyll was interrupted by Lady Silverdale, who came into the room, saying in the voice of one who had passed the limits of her endurance: “I do think, Hetta, that you might have come to tell me—” She broke off, and exclaimed in scandalized accents: “Hen-ri-etta!” Then, as Desford looked quickly round, and she perceived who it was who was embracing her daughter, her note changed. “Desford!” she cried joyfully. “Oh, my dear, dear boy! Oh, how happy this makes me! Hetta, my darling child! Now I don’t care what happens!”

“But, Mama!” objected Hetta, wickedly quizzing her. “You told me that nothing would prevail upon you to give your consent to my marrying Des! Why, you even congratulated me on my fortunate escape from such a fate!”

“Nonsense, Hetta!” said Lady Silverdale, very properly dismissing this untimely reminiscence. “It has been the one wish of my life! I have always been excessively fond of him, and, what’s more, I have never wavered from my conviction that he is just the man for you!”

“Thank you, ma’am!” said Desford, raising her hand to his lips. “I hope I may be just the man for Hetta, but all I know is that she is just the woman for me!”

“Dear Ashley! Very prettily said!” she approved. “It is what one so particularly likes in you! To be sure, I was not quite pleased with you when you brought Wilfred Steane’s child here, but that’s not of the smallest consequence now! But I must say, Hetta, it was as much as I could do to say what was proper when she told me, just now, that she had accepted an offer from Mr Nethercott. It seemed to me that there was to be no end to the gentlemen she steals from you! First it was Desford; then it was Charlie—not, of course, that he is one of your suitors, but the principle is the same—and now it’s Mr Nethercott! Well, she’s welcome to him, for I never thought him worthy of you, never! Desford, you will stay to dine with us, of course. Hetta, run and warn Ufford—No, I’ll see him myself, and Charlie must talk to Grimshaw about champagne. Bless you, my dear ones!” With these words she went away to confer with the cook, her gait at startling variance from the tottering steps which had brought her into the room a few minutes earlier.

The lovers then resumed their previous occupation, only to be almost immediately interrupted by Simon, who strolled in, checked on the threshold in surprise at the sight which met his eyes, and burst into a shout of laughter. Reproved in no uncertain terms by his elder brother, he was quite unrepentant. “Oh, isn’t there anything to laugh at!” he said, kissing Hetta’s cheek, and painfully wringing the Viscount’s hand. “Here’s the pair of you, smelling of April and May ever since I can remember, and it ain’t until I put it into your heads that it occurs to either of you to stop huffling and get spliced! Well, I told you you didn’t know how nacky my best was, Des, but you know now!”

He then took his leave of them, declining an invitation to join the dinner-party on the score of its being imperative that he should be in London before it became too dark to see his way. “I’m off to Brighton in the morning,” he explained. “But if you should get into any more scrapes, Des, just send me word, and I’ll post straight back to rescue you!”