“Your pretensions! I wish you will not talk in that absurd way!” she said impatiently. He was silent, and she pressed his arm, saying, in a lighter tone: “Do you know I am close on twenty-six years of age? I am very much obliged to you for offering for me! I had quite given up hope of achieving a respectable alliance.”

He smiled, but said: “It won’t do, Serena. You must not try to turn it off. This matter must be seriously discussed between us.”

“Not now! I don’t know how it is, but I have the headache. Don’t tease me. Hector!”

“My darling! I will rather beg you to go up to bed! You should not have let me keep you at the piano! Have you any fever?”

She pulled her hand away. “No, no! It’s nothing—the heat! Ah, here is the tea-tray at last!”

He looked at her in concern, which was not lessened by Fanny’s saying: “A headache? You, dearest? I never knew you to complain of such a thing before! Oh, I hope you may not have a touch of the sun! I wish you will go to bed! Lybster, desire her ladyship’s woman to fetch some vinegar to her room directly, if you please!”

“No!” almost shrieked Serena. “For heaven’s sake, let me alone! Of all things in the world I most abominate being—” She clipped the word off short, and gave a gasp. “I beg your pardon!” she said, forcing a smile. “You are both of you very kind, but pray believe I don’t wish to have my temples bathed with vinegar, or to have such a rout made over nothing! I shall be better when I have drunk some tea.”

It seemed as if the Major was going to say something, but even as he opened his mouth to speak Fanny caught his eye, and very slightly shook her head. “Will you take this cup to Serena, Major?” she said calmly.

But he had first to hover over Serena, while she disposed herself in a wing-chair, to place a cushion behind her head, and a stool at her feet. Her hands gripped the arms of her chair till her knuckles gleamed, and her lips were tightly compressed. But when he set her cup down on a table beside her, she smiled again, and thanked him. Fanny began to talk to him, in her soft voice, distracting his attention from Serena. In a minute or two, Serena sat up, allowing the cushion to slide down behind her, and sipped her tea. When she spoke, it was in her usual manner, but when she had finished the tea in her cup she went away to bed, saying, however, that her headache was gone, and she was merely sleepy.

The Major turned an anxious gaze upon Fanny. “Do you think her seriously unwell, Lady Spenborough?”

“Oh, I hope not!” she replied. “I think, perhaps, Lord Rotherham vexed her. If she is not better in the morning, I will try to persuade her to let me send for the doctor. But it never answers to pay any heed if she is not quite well.” She smiled at him consolingly. “She cannot bear anyone to be in a fuss about her, you see. Indeed, I quite thought she would have flown out at you for trying to make her comfortable. Will you have some more tea?”

“No, thank you. I must go. I shall call tomorrow morning, if I may, to see how she goes on,” he said.

But when he presented himself in Laura Place at ten o’clock next day, he found the ladies breakfasting, Serena in her riding dress. She greeted him with mock abuse, demanding to be told why he had broken faith with her. “Ten whole minutes did I wait for you to come trotting over the bridge, and that, let me tell you, is longer than I have waited for any man before! Well for you you did not appear by that time, for I should certainly have sworn at you! Fanny, I forbid you to give him that coffee! He has slighted me!”

“I never dreamed you would ride this morning!” he exclaimed. “I came only to see how you did! Are you sure you are quite well? You didn’t go alone?”

“No, with Fobbing.”

“It is too hot for riding: I wish you will not!”

“On the contrary, it was delightful. I don’t gallop Maid Marian, of course.”

“I was thinking of you, not the mare!”

“Oh, hush!” Fanny said, laughing. “You could not say anything she would think more shocking!”

“No, indeed! And not one word of apology, note!”

“My repentance is too deep to be expressed! You won’t go out again, will you? At least not in the heat of the day!”

“Yes, I’ve persuaded Fanny to forgo, the drinking of her horrid waters, and to drive with me instead to Melksham Forest. I hope you give her credit for heroism!”

“What, you don’t mean to drive her in your phaeton?”

“Most certainly I do!”

“Serena, not alone, I do implore you!”

“You and Fobbing will ride behind us, to protect us from highwaymen, and to set the phaeton on its wheels again when I have overturned it. I won’t do so above twice!”

There was nothing but nonsense to be got out of her, then or thereafter. She was in the gayest of moods all day, and at her most affectionate, yet when he parted from her he felt that he had not once come within touching distance of her.

He thought it wisest not to revert immediately to the vexed question of her inheritance, and when, after ten days, he ventured to raise the subject, she surprised him by listening without interruption to his carefully considered arguments, and by saying, when he had done: “Very well: let it be as you wish, my dear! After all, I don’t greatly care. Not enough, at all events, to make you uncomfortable. When the time comes, arrange it as you think proper!”

She would have banished the matter there; he could not. No sooner did she yield than he was torn by doubt. Rotherham’s words echoed in his mind: what right had he to insist on her relinquishing the means whereby she might live as she had always done? She listened with what patience she could muster, but exclaimed at last: “Oh, Hector, what are you at? You told me you cannot bear it if I use my fortune, and I submitted! Now you tell me you cannot bear to deprive me of it!”

“Do I seem absurd? I suppose I must. I don’t wish you to submit, now or ever! I couldn’t do it on such terms as that. Only if you too desired it!”

“No, that is asking too much of me!” she cried. “I must have less than common sense if I desired anything so foolish!”

“Oh, my dear, if it seems foolish to you, how could I let you make a sacrifice to my pride?”

She looked at him strangely. “Ask yourself how I could let you sacrifice your pride to my extravagant habits. I could tell you how easily I might do that! Don’t—don’t encourage me to rule you! I shall try to, you know. There! you are warned! Handsome of me, wasn’t it? Don’t let us speak of this again! Only tell me when you have decided what to do!”

They did not speak of it again. He thought of it continually; she seemed to have put it quite out of her mind. If her indifference was a mask, she never let it slip. She seemed to him to be in the best of health and spirits, so full of unflagging energy that it was he who sometimes felt tired, keeping pace with her. He told Fanny once, half in jest, half in earnest, that he never knew from one moment to the next where she would be, or what she might be doing. “I think,” Fanny said, “that it is perhaps because she is very happy. She has always a great deal of energy, but I never saw her so restless before. She can’t be still!”

Mrs Floore noticed it, and drew her own conclusions. She bore down upon Fanny one day in the Pump Room, and, ruthlessly ousting young Mr Ryde, her most fervent admirer, from her side, lowered herself into the chair he had been obliged to offer her. “Well, I don’t doubt that’s one enemy I’ve made!” she remarked cheerfully. “Between you, my lady, you and Lady Serena have got the men in this town so lovelorn that it’s a wonder the other young females ain’t all gone off into declines!”

Fanny laughed, but shook her head. “It is Lady Serena they admire, not me, ma’am!”

“I don’t deny anyone would take her for a jam-jar, the way all these silly bumble-bees keep buzzing round her,” agreed Mrs Floore, “but there’s some that like you better, if you’ll pardon my saying so! As for that young sprig that gave up his chair to me with the worst grace I ever did see, he makes a bigger cake of himself than ever the Major did, when he used to come day after day into this room, looking for her ladyship.”

“Mr Ryde is only a boy, and dreadfully stupid!” Fanny said hastily.

“He’s stupid enough, I grant you. Which the Major is not,” said Mrs Floore, cocking a shrewd eye at Fanny. “What I thought at first, my lady, was that that was just a Bath flirtation. But, lord bless me. Lady Serena wouldn’t be in such a fine flow of spirits if that’s all it is! When is it to be, that’s what I’d like to know?”

Fanny, anything but appreciative of the wink so roguishly bestowed upon her, said as coldly as her tender heart would permit: “I am afraid I don’t know what you mean, ma’am.”

“Keeping it a secret, are they?” Mrs Floore shook with fat chuckles. “As though it wasn’t plain enough for a blind man to see! Well, if that’s how it is, I won’t ask any questions, my lady. I can’t help watching them, and having my own notions, though!”

The very thought of being watched by Mrs Floore was so objectionable to Fanny that she almost summoned up enough resolution to remonstrate with Serena on her imprudence. But before she had quite succeeded in doing so something happened to give the old lady’s thoughts another direction. Midway through July she once more had herself driven to Laura Place, announcing on arrival that such a piece of news as she had she couldn’t keep to herself, not if she died of it.

“Which I very likely would have done, through going off pop, like a gingerbeer bottle,” she said. “Who do you think will be staying with me before I’m more than a day older?”