“You might also have guessed that I meant it.”

She found herself suddenly a little breathless; and wished, for the first time, that she was more experienced in the art of dalliance. There was a note of sincerity in his voice; but caution warned her not to allow herself to be taken in by a man of the world whom she judged to be expert in flirtation. She managed to laugh, although rather shakily, and to say: “Very prettily said. Sir Waldo! I must give you credit too for having brought Tiffany back to us all compliance and good humour. A triumph indeed!”

“Fencing with me, Miss Trent?”

She was silent for a moment or two, and when she did speak it was with a good deal of constraint. “I think you forget my situation, sir.”

“On the contrary: your situation chafes me too much to be forgotten.”

She looked at him in astonishment. “Chafes you!”

“Beyond endurance! You stare! Does it seem so strange to you that I should very much dislike seeing you in such a position?”

“Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “One would suppose I was one of those unfortunate governesses who, for £24 a year, become drudges! But I’m no such thing! I’m excessively expensive, in fact.”

“So you once told me.”

“Well, it’s true. I don’t like to boast, but I can’t allow you to suppose that I eke out a miserable existence on a pittance. I am paid £150 a year!”

“My dear girl, it would make no difference if you were paid ten times that sum!”

“That shows how little you know! It makes a great deal of difference, I promise you. Females who are paid very high wages are never used like drudges.”

“You are at the beck and call of a woman I could more readily suppose to be your housekeeper than your mistress; you are obliged to endure impertinence from that abominable chit any time she is out of temper, and patronage from such mushrooms as—”

“Nonsense!” she interrupted. “Mrs Underhill treats me as if I were one of her family, and I won’t have her abused! I think myself very fortunate, and if I don’t dislike my position there can be no reason for anyone else to do so!”

“Oh, yes, there can be!” he retorted.

They had reached the gates of Staples, where the others had pulled up to wait for them. Miss Trent hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry that her tête-à-tête with the Nonesuch had come to an abrupt end, and when he and Lindeth had taken their leave she rode up the avenue to the house so lost in her own thoughts that Courtenay had to speak her name twice before she realized that she was being addressed.

He supposed her to be tired; and Tiffany, at her most caressing, was instantly all solicitude. Miss Trent was obliged to take herself to task for harbouring the uncharitable suspicion that her engaging manner sprang from a wish to avert a scold for her previous conduct.

Mrs Underhill said she was quite shocked to think of poor Lizzie’s indisposition, but not at all surprised. She and Charlotte had taken a turn in the shrubbery, which had regularly exhausted her, so hot as it had been. Miss Trent made no mention of Tiffany’s outburst, but when Courtenay came in he gave his mother a full and indignant account of it, stigmatizing his lovely cousin as a devil’s daughter whom he was ashamed to own, and adding that she might as well stop setting her cap at Lindeth, since the veriest clodpole could have seen how outrageous he thought her behaviour.

This was all very dreadful, but, as Mrs Underhill presently confided to Miss Trent, every cloud had a silver lining. “For Courtenay told me, my dear, that his lordship was downright shocked, so I shouldn’t wonder at it if he began to hedge off. Very likely it will have given him a disgust of her, for there’s nothing gentlemen hate more than the sort of dust Tiffany kicks up when she flies into one of her miffs. Don’t you think so?”

Miss Trent agreed. She also thought that Courtenay’s disgust was considerably stronger than Lindeth’s, but this she did not say.

“And it was Sir Waldo that stopped her from going her length, and took her off to Bardsey, which I’ll be bound you were glad of, my dear, though whether it was what he wanted to do is another matter!”

The arch note in the good lady’s voice was unmistakeable. Miss Trent’s fine eyes turned towards her involuntarily, asking a startled question.

“Lor’, my dear, as if I was such a nodcock as not to know it’s you he’s got a preference for!” said Mrs Underhill, with a fat chuckle. “To be sure, I did think at first that he was making up to Tiffany, but for all I haven’t got book-learning I hope I’ve enough rum gumption to know he’s trying to fix his interest with you!”

“You are mistaken, ma’am—you must be mistaken!” stammered Ancilla.

“Well, that’s what I thought myself, when I first took the notion into my head,” conceded Mrs Underhill. “Not that I mean you ain’t genteel, as I hope I don’t need to tell you, for I’m sure anyone would take you for a lady of quality, such distinguished ways as you have, which even Mrs Mickleby has remarked to me more than once. But there’s no denying it isn’t to be expected that such a smart as Sir Waldo wouldn’t be looking a great deal higher if he was hanging out for a wife, for from what Mrs M. tells me he’s a gentleman of the first consequence, let alone being as rich as a new-shorn lamb, and has goodness knows how many fine ladies on the catch for him!”

“Ma’am!” interrupted Ancilla, in a stifled voice, “I am neither a fine lady, nor am I on the catch for Sir Waldo!”

“No, my dear, and well do I know it! I shouldn’t wonder at it if it was that which took his fancy. If you was to ask me, I should say that there’s nothing will make a gentleman sheer off quicker than the feel that he’s being hunted! Lord! the females that set their caps at Mr Underhill! Of course, he wasn’t a grand town beau, like Sir Waldo, but he was thought to be a great catch, and might have had his pick of all the girls in Huddersfield. And what must he do but set his fancy on me, just because I didn’t pay any more heed to him than I did to any of my beaux!”

Miss Trent, only too glad to encourage this divagation, said: “I don’t think that was why he set his fancy on you, ma’am, but I can readily believe that you had any number of beaux!”

“Well, I had,” admitted Mrs Underhill, gratified. “You wouldn’t think it, to look at me now, but, though it don’t become me to say so, I was used to be a very pretty girl, and had so many compliments paid me—But that’s not what I was wanting to say to you!”

Miss Trent, having learnt by experience that however far her employer might wander from the point she rarely lost sight of it, resigned herself.

“You won’t take it amiss when I tell you, my dear, that when I saw the look in Sir Waldo’s eyes whenever he had them fixed on you, which nobody could mistake, though I’d be hard put to it to describe it to you, if you was to ask me, it cast me into quite a quake, thinking that he was intending to give you a slip on the shoulder, as the saying is.”

“Dear ma’am, I am—I am very much obliged to you for your concern, but indeed you have no need to be in a quake!”

“No, that’s just what I think myself,” said Mrs Underhill, nodding wisely. “I’d have dropped a hint in your ear otherwise, you being so young, for all you try to gammon everyone into thinking you are an old maid! But, ‘no,’ I said to myself, ‘a libertine he may be’—not that I’ve any reason to suppose he is, mind!—‘but he ain’t making up to Miss Trent meaning nothing more than marriage with the left hand: not with her uncle being General Sir Mordaunt Trent, as he is!’ Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it?” She paused, eyeing Ancilla in some bewilderment. “Now, whatever have I said to throw you into whoops?” she demanded.

“Oh, I beg your pardon, ma’am!” Ancilla said, wiping her streaming eyes. “But it is so—so absurd—!”

“Exactly so! But don’t you tell me he ain’t making up to you, because I’m not as blind as a beetle, which I’d have to be not to see what’s going on under my nose!”

Ancilla had stopped laughing. She was rather flushed, and she said haltingly: “I think, ma’am—I think you refine too much on Sir Waldo’s gallantry. I am persuaded he has no other intention than to amuse himself with a little flirtation.”

Mrs Underhill’s face fell; but after thinking it over for a minute, she brightened, saying: “No, you’re out there, my dear. It’s Tiffany he flirts with, which, of course, he oughtn’t to do, but, lord, they all do it, even the Squire, and you can’t blame them, so pretty and saucy as she is! But he don’t look at her the way he looks at you—no, and he don’t talk to you as he does to her either! What’s more, if she ain’t in the room he don’t look up every time the door opens, hoping she’s going to come in!”

Her cool composure seriously disturbed, Ancilla said involuntarily: “Oh, Mrs Underhill, d-does he do so when—Oh, no! Surely not?”

“Lord bless you, my dear, of course he does!” replied Mrs Underhill, with an indulgent laugh. “And if it is you—well, often and often I’ve thought to myself that if he was to smile at me the way he does at you I should be cast into a regular flutter, as old as I am!”

Miss Trent felt her cheeks burning, and pressed her slim hands to them. “He—he has a very charming smile, I know!”

“I’ll be bound you do!” retorted Mrs Underhill. “Mark my words if we don’t have him popping the question before we’ve had time to turn round! And this I will say, my dear: I couldn’t be better pleased if you was my own daughter! Not that he’d do for Charlotte, even if she was old enough, which, of course, she isn’t, because, from all I can discover, he’s nutty upon horses, and well you know that she can’t abide ’em!”