“Good God! Murder her?”

“There’s no need to be in a quake,” he said reassuringly. “No one will ever know!”

“If only—oh, if only I could do to you what I long to do!” exclaimed Anthea. “If you were but afew inches shorter—!”

He said hopefully: “Nay, don’t let that fatch you, love I It’ll be no trouble at all to lift you up: in fact, there’s nothing I’d like better!”

Furiously blushing, she retorted: “I didn’t mean that I wished to kiss you!”

He heaved a despondent sigh. “I was afraid you didn’t,” he said, sadly shaking his head. “I was reet taken-aback, but I thought to myself: Come now, lad! She’d never raise your hopes only to cast you down! So—”

“Cousin Hugo, you are outrageous!”said Anthea, in a shaking voice.

Horrified, he replied: “You’re reet; I am, love! I need someone to take me in hand, and that’s the truth! Of course, if Amelia had been a different sort of a lass—more after your style!—she’d have been just the one to undertake me, but—”

“Cousin Hugo!” interrupted Anthea, feeling that it was high time he was brought to book, “you may bamboozle everyone else, but you won’t bamboozle me!”

“Do you think I don’t know that, love?” he said, smiling at her in a very disturbing way.

“You invented Amelia Melkinthorpe because you were afraid you might find yourself obliged to offer for me!” continued Anthea, prudently ignoring this interpolation. “And if you think—”

“Nay, you’re fair and far off, lass!”

“Am I? Then perhaps, cousin, you will tell me why you did invent her? Not,” she added scathingly, “that I shall believe a word of it!”

“Are you telling me I’m a liar?” demanded Hugo, insulted.

“Yes!” responded Anthea doggedly.

“I thought you were,” said Hugo, relapsing with disconcerting suddenness into dejection.

Miss Darracott, realizing with bitter resentment that she was quite unable to control her own voice, averted her gaze, and took her quivering underlip firmly between her teeth.

Much encouraged, the abandoned creature before her said confidentially: “It was this road, love! By the time you took me up to the picture-gallery my spirits were so low and oppressed by all the black looks I’d had cast on me, and I was feeling that lonely—eh, I was never more miserable in my life!”

“F-Fiddle!” uttered Anthea, shaken but staunch.

“I won’t deny the old gentleman threw me into a terrible quake when he told me the scheme he had in his mind,” pursued Hugo, making a clean breast of it. “It seemed to me there was only one thing for it: to shab off as fast I could before I found myself gapped! For of all the proud, disagreeable females—”

“Yes, but I—You know v-very well why I—”

“The way you sat there beside me at the dinner-table, never so much as looking at me!” he said reminiscently. “And not a word to be got from you but Yes, and No, except once, when you said Indeed! I thought you were reet cruel. There I was, scared out of my wits—”

“You weren’t! You were not!”

“—scared out of my wits,” he repeated firmly, “and my heart in my shoes, and you weren’t even civil to me, let alone friendly!”

“You need not th-think I don’t know you are m-merely trying to overset me! You didn’t care a rush for any of us!”

“However, when you told me how it was,” he continued, still lost in reminiscence, “I saw I’d been mistaken in you. That was the first time you smiled at me. Ee, lass, you’ve got a lovely smile! Happen you don’t know the way it starts in your eyes, giving them such a mischievous look, as—”

“That will do!” interposed Anthea, rigorously suppressing a strong desire to encourage him to develop this agreeable theme.

“I was only trying to explain how I came to invent Amelia!” he said in an injured voice. “The thing was that when you smiled at me it set me cudgelling my brains to hit on some way I could get you to stop thinking you had to keep me at a distance, which I could see you’d be bound to do, the way his lordship was trying to throw us together, unless I could put it into your head that there was no reason why you should.”

“It is possible that you have the—the audacity to suppose that you can make me believe that I had only to smile to make you wish to marry me?” demanded Anthea, justly incensed.

“Nay, I never said that!” he protested. “All I wanted was a friend! In fact,” he added, with the air of one brilliantly inspired, “it was Hobson’s Choice! I don’t say I wouldn’t liefer have made up to my Aunt Aurelia, mind, but—”

“Will you stop behaving in this odious fashion?” begged Anthea, in sore straits. “You are utterly without conduct, or—or propriety of taste! You would be very well-served if you did find yourself riveted to me! I promise you, you’d come home by weeping cross!”

“Ay, I know I would,” he agreed. “A dog’s life I’d lead, with you riding rough-shod over me, as I don’t doubt you would, seeing that you’re such a shrew, but—”

“Exactly so! So why, pray, do you wish to be married to me?” said Anthea, pouncing on opportunity.

“Eh, lass, I thought you knew!” he answered, his eyes round with surprise. “To please his lordship, of course!”

Miss Darracott’s feelings threatened to overcome her. None of the rejoinders that rose to her lips seemed adequate to the occasion; she stared up in seething impotence at her tormentor; saw that he was watching her with an appreciative and extremely reprehensible twinkle in his eyes; and decided that the only way to deal with him was to pay him back in his own coin. So she said, with really very creditable calm: “I need scarcely tell you that that is an object with me too, but try as I will I can’t bring myself to the sticking-point.”

“Come now, love, never say that!” he responded, in heartening accents. “To be sure, there’s a lot of me to swallow but you’re too game to be beaten on any suit!”

She shook her head. “There’s not enough of you to swallow,” she said. “I must tell you that my disposition, besides being shrewish, is mercenary. I am determined to marry a man of fortune. Large fortune!”

“Oh, I’ve plenty of brass!” he assured her.

“I am only interested in gold,” she said loftily. “Furthermore, I have no fancy for living in the Dower House.”

“Well, I can offer you a house in Yorkshire, if you think you could fancy that. I was meaning to see it, but—”

“Have you really a house in Yorkshire?” she asked suspiciously.

“Of course I have!”

“There’s no of course about it!” she said, with asperity. “You tell such shocking whiskers that not the slightest dependence can be placed on anything you say! Where is this house?”

“On the edge of the moor, by Huddersfield. That’s the trouble. When my grandfather gave up the old house, next to the mill, and we went to live at Axby House, it was right in the country, but the town’s been growing and growing, and it will grow still faster now the war’s over, and more and more machines are being invented, and put to use. I hardly recognized the place when I came home at the end of the war in the Peninsula. I don’t think you’d like it, love.”

“No, not at all. I should want a house in London—in the best part, of course!”

“Oh, we’ll have that!”he replied cheerfully.

“We shan’t have anything of the sort—I mean, we shouldn’t—because my Uncle Matthew has the town-house!”

“Well, there’s more than one house to be had in town!”

“Dear me, yes! How could I be so stupid? I might have known you meant to purchase a handsome establishment!”

“I was thinking of hiring one, myself.”

“No, no, only think how shabby! Next you will say that you don’t intend to have more than one house in the country!”

“Nay, I shan’t say that! I want one in Leicestershire.”

“Oh, in that case there’s no more to be said, for I’ve set my heart on one in the moon!”

“You don’t mean that, love! Nay then, you can’t have thought!” he expostulated. “It’s much too far from town!”

An involuntary laugh escaped her, but she said: “I might have known you’d have an answer! Do you think we have now talked enough nonsense?”

“I’m not talking nonsense, lass. I’d give you the whole moon if I could, and throw in the stars for good measure,” he said, taking her hand, and kissing it. “You couldn’t be content with less?”

“You—you are talking nonsense!” she said, feeling suddenly breathless, and more than a little startled. She was inexperienced in the art of flirtation, but it had certainly occurred to her on various occasions that in this her large cousin had the advantage of her. His methods (judged by such knowledge as she had acquired during one London Season) were original, but that he might be entertaining serious intentions she had not consciously considered. Nor had she looked into her own heart. She had accepted him, after her first mistrust, as a delightfully easy companion who had kept her in a ripple of amusement: not the hero of her vague imaginings, but a simple solid creature, wholly to be trusted. She now realized, with a sense of shock, that this enormous and apparently guileless intruder had taken the grossest advantage of her innocence, advancing by imperceptible but rapid stages from the position of a stranger to be treated with circumspection to that of the close friend in whom she could safely confide, and who was, for some obscure reason, indispensable to her comfort. Any belief she might have had in the existence of the beautiful Miss Melkinthorpe had admittedly been of short duration, but the thought of marrying the Major herself had not, until this moment, entered her head. It was clearly necessary to temporize. Withdrawing her hand from his, she said, in a rallying tone: “Recollect that we have been acquainted for less than a month! You cannot, cousin, have fallen—formed an attachment in so short a time!”