“Are you quite positive that she didn’t tell you of the scheme she and the Iverleys hatched between them?” she demanded incredulously.

“No,” he replied. “I am not positive that she didn’t, but I was unable to decipher more than the first page of her letter—and that with difficulty, since she had spattered it with her tears! The second sheet baffled me, for not only did she weep over it, but she crossed and recrossed her lines—no doubt with the amiable intention of sparing me extra expense.”

Her eyes had widened as she listened to him, but although she was shocked by his indifference she could not help being amused by it. Amusement quivered in her voice as she said: “What an extraordinary man you are, Mr Carleton! You received a letter from your ward’s aunt, written in extreme agitation, and you neither made any real effort, I am very sure, to decipher that second sheet, nor—if the blotches did indeed baffle you—to go down to Chartley to discover precisely what had happened!”

“Yes, it seemed at first as though that hideous necessity did lie before me,” he agreed. “Fortunately, however, the following day brought me a letter from Iverley, which had the merit of being short, and legible. He informed me that Lucilla was in Bath, that her aunt was prostrate, and that if I wished to rescue my ward from the clutches of what he feared was a designing female, calling herself Miss Wychwood, I must leave for Bath immediately.”

“Well, if that is not the outside of enough!” she said wrathfully. “Calling myself Miss Wychwood, indeed! And in what way am I supposed to have designs on Lucilla, pray?”

“That he didn’t disclose.”

“If he knew that Lucilla was staying with me, he must have written to you after Ninian’s return to Chartley, for he couldn’t otherwise have known where she had gone to, or what my name is! Yes, and after Ninian had given Mrs Amber the letter I had written to her, informing her of the circumstances of my meeting with Lucilla, and begging her to grant the child permission to stay with me for a few weeks! I should be glad to know why, if she thought me a designing female, she sent Lucilla’s trunks to her! What a ninnyhammer she must be! But as for Iverley! How dared he write such damaging stuff about me? If he talked like that to Ninian I’m not surprised Ninian ripped up at him!”

“Your conversation, ma’am, bears a strong resemblance to Clara Amber’s letter!” he said acidly. “Both are unintelligible! What the devil has Ninian to do with this hotch-potch?”

“He has everything to do with it! Mrs Amber and the Iverleys are determined to marry him to Lucilla! That is why she ran away!”

“Marry him to Lucilla?” he repeated. “What nonsense! Are you trying to tell me the boy is in love with her? I don’t believe it!”

“No, I am not trying to tell you that! He wants the match as little as she does, but dared not tell his father so for fear of bringing about one of the heart-attacks with which Iverley terrorizes his family into obeying his every whim! I don’t think you can have the least notion of what the situation is at Chartley!”

“Very likely not. I haven’t visited the house since my sister-in-law’s death. Iverley and I don’t deal together, and never did.”

“Then I’ll tell you!” promised Miss Wychwood, and straightway launched into a graphic description of the circumstances which had goaded Lucilla into precipitate flight.

He heard her in silence, but the expression on his face was discouraging, and when she came to the end of her recital he was so far from evincing either sympathy or understanding that he ejaculated, in exasperated accents: “Oh, for God’s sake, ma’am! Spare me any more of this Cheltenham tragedy! What a kick-up over something that might have been settled in a flea’s leap!”

“Mr Carleton,” she said, holding her temper on a tight rein, “I am aware that you, being a man, can scarcely be blamed for failing to appreciate the dilemma in which Lucilla found herself; but I assure you that to a girl just out of the schoolroom it must have seemed that she had walked into a trap from which the only escape was flight! Had Ninian had enough resolution to have told his father that he had no intention of making Lucilla an offer it must have brought the thing to an end. Unfortunately, his affection for his father, coupled with the belief—instilled into his head, I have no doubt at all, by his mother!—that to withstand Iverley’s demands was tantamount to murdering him, overcame whatever resolution he may have had. As far as I have been able to discover, the only notion he had was to become engaged to Lucilla, and to trust in providence to prevent the subsequent marriage! The one good thing that has emerged from this escapade is that Ninian, finding, on his return to Chartley, that his fond father had worked himself into a rare passion, without suffering the slightest ill, began to see that Iverley’s weak heart was little more than a weapon to hold over his household.”

“I am wholly uninterested in Ninian, or in any other young cub!” said Mr Carleton trenchantly. “I accept—on your assurance!—that the pressure brought to bear on Lucilla was hard to withstand. What I do not accept, ma’am, is that her only remedy lay in flight! Why the devil didn’t the little nod-cock write to me?”

She fairly gasped at this question, and it was a full minute before she was able to command her voice sufficiently to answer it with composure. “I fancy, sir, that her previous experiences of writing to you for support had not led her to suppose that any other reply to an appeal to you for help would be forthcoming than that she must do as her aunt thought best,” she said.

She observed, with satisfaction, that she had at last succeeded in discomfiting him. He reddened, and said, in a voice of smouldering annoyance: “Since the only appeals I’ve received from Lucilla have been concerned with matters quite outside my province—”

“Even an appeal for a horse of her own?” she interjected swiftly. “Was that also outside your province, Mr Carleton?”

A frown entered his eyes. “Did she ask me for one? I have no recollection of it.”

It was now her turn to be disconcerted, for she found that she could not remember whether a refusal to permit her to have a horse of her own had been one of Lucilla’s accusations against him, or merely one of Mrs Amber’s prohibitions against which she had not thought it worth her while to protest to her uncle. Fortunately, she was not obliged either to retract or to prevaricate, for, without waiting for a reply, he said: “If she did, I daresay I did refuse to let her set up her own stable. I can conceive of few more foolish notions than to be keeping a horse and groom in a town—both, I have little doubt, eating their heads off!”

Having discovered the truth of this herself, she was unable to deny it, so she prudently abandoned the question, and cast back to her original accusation, saying: “But am I not right in believing that your custom is to refer every request Lucilla has addressed to you to Mrs Amber’s judgment?”

“Yes, of course you are,” he replied impatiently. “What the devil do I know about the upbringing of schoolgirls?”

“What a miserable sop to offer your conscience!” she said.

“My conscience doesn’t need a sop, ma’am!” he said harshly. “I may be Lucilla’s legal guardian, but it was never expected of me that I should be concerned in the niceties of her upbringing! Had it been suggested to me I should have had no hesitation in refusing such a charge. I’ve no turn for the infantry!”

“Not even for your brother’s only child?” she asked. “Don’t you feel any affection for her?”

“No, none,” he replied. “How should I? I scarcely know her. It’s useless to expect me to become sentimental because she’s my brother’s child: I knew almost as little about him as I know about Lucilla, and what I did know I didn’t much like. I don’t mean to say that there was any harm in him: no doubt there was a great deal of good, but he had less than commonsense, and too much sensibility for my tastes. I found him a dead bore.”

“Well, I find my brother a dead bore too,” she said candidly, “but however much we rub against each other there is a bond of affection between us. I had thought that that must always exist between brothers and sisters.”

“Possibly you know him better than I ever knew my brother. There were only three years between us, but although that’s a mere nothing between adults, it constitutes a wide gulf between schoolboys. At Harrow, he formed a close, and, to my mind, a pretty mawkish friendship with young Elmore. They were both army-mad, and joined the same regiment when they left Harrow. From then on I only saw him by scraps. He married a pretty little widgeon, too: she wasn’t as foolish as her sister, but she had more hair than wit, and a mouth full of the sort of pap I can’t stomach. I knew, of course, when he bought Chartley Manor that the bosom-bow friendship between him and Elmore was as strong as ever, and I suppose I should have guessed that such a pair of air-dreamers would have hatched a scheme to achieve a closer relationship by marrying Elmore’s heir to Charles’s daughter. Though why Elmore—or Iverley, as by that time he was—should have persisted in this precious scheme after Charles’s death is a matter beyond my comprehension! Unless he thinks that Lucilla’s property is just the thing to round off his own estate?”

“Well, that is what I suspect,” nodded Miss Wychwood, “but it is only right that I should tell you that Ninian says it is no such thing. He says his father has never had a mercenary thought in his head.”

“On the whole,” said Mr Carleton, with considerable acerbity, “I should think the better of him if his motive had been mercenary! This mawkish reason for trying to marry Lucilla to his son merely because he and my brother were as thick as inkle-weavers fairly turns my stomach! I never liked the fellow, you know.”