‘To own the truth,’ confided Nan, ‘I am excessively glad of it. I am a great deal better, I assure you, but I would as lief not drive any farther for a little while.’

‘Just so,’ agreed Sir Charles, with a wry smile. ‘But as I can place not the slightest dependence upon Mrs Fitton’s feeling alarm until it will be too late for her to return in quest of you, I have thought it advisable to inform them here that you are my young sister.’

‘Now, that,’ said Miss Massingham, betraying at once her innocence and her sophistication, ‘is a truly splendid thing, sir, for it shows that at last I am a grown-up lady!’

‘Let me tell you,’ said Sir Charles severely, ‘that if you had refrained from buying that outrageous hat I should have had no need to employ this subterfuge! Never in my life have I encountered such an abominably behaved brat as you are, Nan!’

‘I have been very troublesome to you, sir,’ said Nan penitently. ‘Are you very much vexed with me?’

He laughed. ‘No. But you will ruin all if you call me “sir” in this inn! Remember that I am your brother, and say “Charles”!’

5

A night’s rest did much to restore Miss Massingham to the enjoyment of her usual spirits. She partook of an excellent breakfast; hoped that Duke, in whose company Sir Charles had endured a disturbed night, had not discommoded her protector; and demonstrated the ease with which she could, with the aid of a stick, hop about on one foot. Sir Charles, who had been relieved to find, on pulling back his blinds, that only a light powdering of snow lay upon the road, recommended her to sit quietly on the sofa, and went out to see a pair of horses put-to. It was upon his return to the inn that, entering from a door at the back of the house, he was halted in his tracks by the sight of a handsome young woman, who had just come in through the front door.

This lady, catching sight of him, exclaimed: ‘Charles! You here?’

‘Almeria!’ returned her betrothed, in hollow accents.

‘But how comes this about?’ demanded her ladyship, advancing towards him with her hand held out. ‘Is it possible you can have come to meet me? We spent the night at the Pelican, you know. A broken trace has made this halt necessary, or we must have missed you. There was not the least occasion for you to come all this way, my dear Charles!’

‘I am ashamed to say,’ replied Sir Charles, dutifully kissing the hand extended to him, ‘that such was not my intention. I am bound for London—to keep an engagement I must not break!’

She did not look to be very well pleased with this response, but just as she was about to demand the nature of his engagement, the landlady came down the stairs, with a large bolster in her arm. ‘This will be just the thing, sir!’ she announced. ‘It has been laying in the loft these years past, and I’m sure Miss is welcome to take it, the sweet, pretty young lady that she is! I’ll carry it out directly, and see if it can’t be arranged so as to make her comfortable!’

With this kindly speech, she disappeared through the door opening on to the stable-yard. Sir Charles, closing his eyes for an anguished moment, opened them again to find that his betrothed was regarding him through unpleasantly narrowed eyes.

‘Miss?’ said the Lady Almeria icily.

‘Why, yes!’ he returned. ‘I am escorting the granddaughter of an old friend home from her school in Bath.’

‘Indeed?’ said Lady Almeria, her brows rising.

‘Oh, good God, Almeria!’ he said impatiently. ‘There is no occasion for you to assume the air of a Siddons! It’s only a child!’

‘A new come-out for you, Charles, to be taking care of children! May I know why a bolster is necessary to her comfort? An infant in arms, I collect?’

‘Nothing but a romp of a schoolgirl, who had the misfortune to sprain her ankle yesterday!’

It was at this inopportune moment that Nan, dressed for the road, hopped out of the parlour. Duke frisking beside her, and announced brightly that she was ready to set forward on the journey. Duke, perceiving that the door to a larger freedom stood open, made a dash for it.

‘Charles! Stop him!’ shrieked Nan.

The voice in which Sir Charles commanded Duke to come to heel startled that animal into cowering instinctively. Before he could recover his assurance, he had been picked up, and tucked under Sir Charles’s arm.

‘You frightened him!’ said Nan reproachfully. She found that she was being surveyed from head to foot by a lady with an arctic eye and contemptuously smiling lips, and glanced enquiringly at Sir Charles.

‘So this,’ said Lady Almeria, ‘is your schoolgirl!’

Sir Charles, only too well aware of the impression likely to be created by Miss Massingham’s hat, sighed, and prepared to embark on what was (as he ruefully admitted to himself) an improbable explanation of his circumstances.

‘Sir Charles is my brother, ma’am!’ said Miss Massing-ham, coming hopefully to the rescue.

Lady Almeria’s lip curled. ‘My good girl, I am well acquainted with Sir Charles’s sister, and I imagine I need be in no doubt of the relationship which exists between you and him!’

‘Be silent!’ Sir Charles snapped. He put Duke into Nan’s free arm. ‘Go back into the parlour, Nan! I will be with you directly,’ he said, smiling reassuringly down at her.

He closed the parlour door upon her, and turned to confront his betrothed. That he was very angry could be seen by the glint in his eyes. But he spoke with studied amiability ‘Do you know, Almeria, I never knew until today how very vulgar you can be?’ he said.

The Lady Almeria then lost her temper. In the middle of the scene which followed, her brother walked into the inn and stood goggling. His intellect was not quick, and it was several minutes before he could understand anything beyond the appalling fact that his sister, whose uncertain temper had chased away many a promising suitor, was engaged in whistling down the wind a bridegroom rich beyond the dreams of avarice. He looked utterly aghast, and seemed not to know what to say. Sir Charles, who had been refreshing himself with a pinch of snuff, shut his box, and said: ‘The lady in question, Stourbridge, as I have already informed Almeria, is a schoolgirl, whom I am escorting to London.’

‘Well, then, Almeria—!’ said his lordship, relieved.

‘Don’t be a fool!’ said Almeria. ‘I have seen the creature!’

‘I should be loth to offer you violence, Almeria,’ said Sir Charles, ‘but if you again refer to that child in such terms I shall soundly box your ears!’

‘You forget, I think, that I am not unprotected!’

‘Stourbridge?’ said Sir Charles. ‘Oh, no, I don’t forget him! If he cares to call me to book I shall be happy to answer him!’

At this point, Lord Stourbridge, who wished to come to fisticuffs with Sir Charles as little as he wished to expose his portly person to that gentleman’s deadly accuracy with a pistol, attempted to remonstrate with his sister. A glance silenced him; she said furiously: ‘Understand, Sir Charles, that our engagement is at an end! I shall be obliged to you if you will send the necessary notice to the Gazette!’

He bowed. ‘It is always a happiness to me to obey you, Almeria!’ he said outrageously.

6

Rejoining Miss Massingham in the parlour, he found her conscience-stricken. ‘Who was that lady, sir?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Why was she so very angry?’

‘That, my child, was the Lady Almeria Spalding. If you are ready to go—’

‘Lady Almeria! Are—are you not engaged to her?’

‘I was engaged to her!’

‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘What have I done? Did she cry off because of me?’

‘She did, but as we are not at all suited to one another I shall not reproach you for that. Foisting a repellant mongrel on me, however, which whined the better part of the night, is another matter; while as for your conduct in Marlborough—’

‘But—but don’t you care that your engagement is broken?’ she interrupted.

‘Not a bit!’

‘Perhaps she will think better of it, and forgive you,’ suggested Nan, in a somewhat wistful tone.

‘I am obliged to you for the warning, and shall insert into the Gazette the notice that my marriage will not take place the instant I reach London,’ he said cheerfully.

‘It is very dreadful, but, do you know, sir, I find I cannot be sorry for it!’

‘I am glad of that,’ he said, smiling.

‘She did not seem to me the kind of female you would like to be married to.’

‘I can imagine none more unlike that female!’

She looked enquiringly up at him, but he only laughed, and said: ‘Come, we must finish this journey of yours, if your grandfather is not to think that we have perished by the wayside!’

‘Do you think he will be angry when he hears all that has happened?’ she asked uneasily.

‘I fear that his anger will fall upon my head. He will say—and with truth!—that I have made a poor hand at looking after you. However, I trust that when he has heard the full tale of your atrocious conduct he will realize that it was experience, and not goodwill, that was lacking in me, and give me leave to study how to do better in future.’

‘I know you are quizzing me,’ said Nan, ‘but I don’t precisely understand what you mean, sir!’

‘I will tell you one day,’ promised Sir Charles. ‘But now we are going to drive to London! Come along!’

She went obediently with him to where the curricle waited, but when he lifted her into it, and disposed her injured foot upon the folded bolster, she sighed, and said shyly: ‘Shall I ever see you again, once I am fixed in Brook Street?’