"I don't think if he had I should have placed undue importance on that,"

she replied.

"Perhaps not, since you have no intention to assist him in his difficulty. But imagine what a complacent reflection it will be for his wife when she realises that she owes the honour of the bestowal of his name upon her to the accident which made him a doctor, and to the super-sensitiveness of the feminine portion of his practice."

"And because of that unfortunate remark of his," Sophy observed with an air of reproach, "you intend to snub him badly one day."

"Snubbing," Peggy returned, "is a wholesome corrective for conceited men."

"I don't think he is nearly so conceited," Sophy contended, "as the pompous person you delight in encouraging to make a fool of himself."

It was significant that although no mention was made of Mr Musgrave's name, although her sister's description was so little accurate as to be, in Peggy's opinion, a libel, she nevertheless had no difficulty in recognising to whom Sophy thus unflatteringly alluded. For a moment she did not answer, having no answer ready, which was unusual. She met Sophy's steadfast eye with a slightly deprecating look, as though she acknowledged reluctantly the justice of the rebuke to herself contained in the other's speech. Then she laughed. There was a quality of mischief in the satisfied ring of the laugh, a captivating infectiousness in its quiet enjoyment. Sophy laughed with her.

"It's too bad of you, Peggy," she protested.

"You have not, for all your shrewdness," observed Peggy deliberately, "gauged Mr Musgrave's character correctly. He couldn't make a fool of himself, because he has no foolish impulses. He is the antithesis of a conceited person. He is a simple, kindly soul, with a number of false ideas of life, and a few ready-made beliefs which he is too conservative to correct or individualise. Aunt Ruby is bent on modernising him; but to modernise John Musgrave would be like pulling down a Norman tower and reconstructing on its foundation a factory-chimney of red brick. I prefer Norman towers myself, though they may have less commercial value."

"You don't mean," said Sophy, opening her eyes very wide, "that you like John Musgrave?"

"As for that," returned Peggy provokingly, "he is, I think, a very likeable person. I believe," she added, with another quiet laugh, "that he entertains a similar opinion of me."

"Does he know you smoke?" inquired Sophy with sarcasm.

"He does. He has attempted unsuccessfully to check the habit."

Sophy appeared to find this amusing. Her merriment had the effect of making Peggy serious again.

"I think being in love is transforming you into a sentimental goose,"

she remarked with some severity. "It is plain that you consider every one must be suffering from the same, idiotic complaint. It will be a relief when you are married. That is the surest cure for sentiment that has been discovered up to the present."

Sophy threw the end of her cigarette in the fire and started to brush her hair.

"On the next occasion when I visit the Hall," she observed maliciously, "I anticipate there will be no smoking allowed in your bedroom."

"It is a vile practice in anyone's bedroom," Peggy returned amiably.

"Besides," added Sophy with a laugh, "it is so unwomanly."

Mr Musgrave also was engaging in his after-dance reflections as he prepared for bed in a room in which there burned no comforting fire. He had taken the rose from his pocket on removing his dress-coat because his man when he brushed the coat in the morning was very likely to go through his pockets, and Mr Musgrave had no wish for him to discover anything so altogether foreign to a gentleman's effects in his possession. He placed the rose on his dressing-table, and was so embarrassed at the sight of this incongruous object among his hair-brushes, and other manly accessories of the toilet, that he was unable to proceed with his undressing for staring at the thing. Odd how disconcerting a trifle such as an artificial rose can become adrift from its natural environment. Seen in the front of Peggy's dress the effect had been simply pleasing; seen in his own bedroom the flimsy thing of dyed silk became a symbol--a significant, sentient thing, inexplicably and closely associated with its late wearer. It was as though in looking at it he looked at Peggy Annersley; looked at her as in a mirror, darkly, from which her smiling face, looked back at him.

Perplexed and immeasurably disconcerted, he stared about him, searching for some safe place in which to secrete the thing. Finally he took it up, unlocked a drawer in a writing-table before the window, and hurriedly, and with a guilty sense of acting in a manner unusual, if not absolutely foolish, he thrust the rose out of sight in the farthest corner of the drawer, where it came in contact with another frivolous feminine article; to which article also, besides its natural scent of kid, clung the same subtle, elusive fragrance of violets which clung about the silken petals of the rose; which clung, as a matter of fact, about everything that Peggy wore.

Mr Musgrave shut the drawer hurriedly and locked it, and threw the bunch of keys on the dressing-table where he could not fail to see them when dressing in the morning, and be reminded by the sight of them to transfer them to his pocket. The drawer in the writing-table was the repository for the few and very innocent secrets which John Musgrave jealously guarded from all eyes but his own.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

A few days after the dance at the Hall Doctor Fairbridge motored out from Rushleigh to pay a call upon Mrs Chadwick. Nominally the call was upon Mrs Chadwick; the object of his visit, however, was to see her niece. It was an object shared by so many that his chance of getting Peggy alone seemed very uncertain. It would appear as though every one were bent on frustrating his attempts to draw her aside from the rest; as though Peggy herself abetted them in their unkind design.

There were staying in the house a number of young people of both sexes.

It seemed to Doctor Fairbridge that many of the girls were quite amiable and charming; nevertheless, the majority of the men evinced a predilection for Peggy's society, which predilection, since he shared in it, he might better have understood.

When a man has made up his mind that he wants to marry; when, moreover, he is equally decided in his selection of his future wife, there is on the face of it no reason for delay. Doctor Fairbridge was fully determined on both points; he was also conscious of the danger of delay in the case of a girl so popular as Peggy; therefore he decided to press his suit on the first opportunity, and he hoped the opportunity would present itself that afternoon. Since it showed no likelihood of offering itself, since Peggy betrayed no readiness to assist him, desperation emboldened him to ask her to go with him into the conservatory for a few minutes' private talk.

"Oh!" murmured Peggy, changing colour, "that sounds so dreadfully mysterious."

She accompanied him, nevertheless. Mrs Chadwick, looking after them as they passed through the glass doors and stepped into the moist and enervating atmosphere of the fernery, which led out from the long drawing-room, looked anxious. She was so certain as to what Doctor Fairbridge intended saying, and so uncertain what Peggy would say in response, that she felt strongly tempted to propose a general move in the same direction. But for the conviction that putting off the inevitable is not to put an end to it, she would have proposed this; instead she diverted the general attention by starting one of her inimitable anecdotes; and in the uproarious laughter which greeted the story the retreat of Peggy and her cavalier was successfully covered.

The sound of the merriment penetrated to the fernery, and brought a smile of sympathy to Peggy's lips. She looked for some response at her companion, but Doctor Fairbridge was so extraordinarily grave that the brightness faded from Peggy's face and left her serious too, and a little embarrassed by the silence which fell between them, which he appeared unequal to break. She started to talk in a professional manner about the ferns; but Doctor Fairbridge had no intention of wasting his time on horticultural matters, and he plunged forthwith into the subject he had so keenly at heart. A little halting in his speech, and less assured in manner than when he had solicited the interview, he stood before Peggy, and looked earnestly into the wilful grey eyes, which at the moment were serious enough.

"Miss Annersley," he began--and finding this address too formal for the occasion, hastily substituted her Christian name--"Peggy, I think you can't be altogether unprepared for what I am about to say. You must know by now how things are with me. I love you. I have loved you ever since I first met you."

He spoke as though the meeting had taken place years before instead of two months ago.

"Tell me," he added, with eager persuasiveness, "do you like me?... just a little?"

Now Peggy was a young woman who had listened to such confidences often, and who, by reason of the numbers of her admirers, had grown hardened to their appeals. She found them, however, sufficiently embarrassing to cause her to regret, not so much wounding her lovers, as the trouble she was put to in order to wound them as little as possible. It showed a want of consideration on the part of the men she wished to be friendly with when they made that agreeable condition no longer possible. Youth and beauty in a woman handicap her in the matter of masculine friendship; yet eliminate the disqualifying attributes, and the difficulty of friendship with the opposite sex is even greater. The position therefore becomes well-nigh impossible.

Peggy looked back at the young man with such disconcerting candour in the grey eyes that he began to feel somewhat foolish and found himself reddening awkwardly. A girl when she receives a proposal of marriage has no right to appear so composed.

"I like you so well," Peggy answered him quietly, "that I hope you won't say anything more. It's--such a pity," she faltered, losing something of her former calmness, "to spoil everything. Let us take a mutual liking for granted, and leave it at that."

This sounded like a brilliant inspiration, but was in reality a repetition of a suggestion made on a similar occasion to an entirely different suppliant. The experience of its ill-success on the former occasion might have prepared her for its inefficacy now, but it was the only thing which flashed into her mind at the moment, and she said it a little breathlessly in the hope that it would decide Doctor Fairbridge in favour of retreat. It failed, however, of the desired effect. He caught at the leaf of a palm near his arm and began unthinkingly on its destruction, not looking at the mischievous work of his fingers, but staring at Peggy.

"I can't leave it at that," he said. "It--it isn't liking with me. I love you. I... Please be patient with me, Miss Annersley. I find it so difficult to express all I feel. Of course, I can't expect that you should love me as I love you... How should you? But I am hoping that perhaps--in time--"

He broke off, so manifestly at a loss in face of the discouragement he read in her indifferent look, so awkward and disturbed and reproachful at her lack of reciprocity, that he found it impossible to proceed with his appeal. He had, in rehearsing the interview in bed on the previous night, brought it to such an entirely different issue that the situation as it actually befell found him unprepared. The virile eloquence of the previous night did not fit the present occasion.

"I want to marry," he finished lamely.

That, in the circumstances, was an unfortunate admission. A gleam, expressive of amusement rather than of tenderness, shone in Peggy's eyes.

"I know," she said. "You told me so before... on account of the practice."

He glared at her, flushed and angry.

"Hang the practice!" he said rudely. "I want to marry you."

This bomb, which had been clumsily preparing from the outset, exploded with little effect. Peggy certainly lowered her eyes, and the warm blood mounted to her cheeks; but she did not appear overwhelmed by this frank declaration. It was, indeed, whatever emotion swayed the speaker, so shorn of sentiment in itself that the girl was relieved of any fear she might have entertained of hurting him with a refusal. Had she been as much in love with him as he had professed to be with her, her answer would still have been "No."

"I am sorry," she said, a trifle unsympathetically. "I don't, you see, want to marry you."

"Don't say 'no' without at least considering my proposal," he urged blankly. "I'll wait--as long as you wish. But I can't take 'no' like that. I've never wanted anything in all my life as I want you. Don't be so unkind, Peggy, as to refuse me a little hope. I'm an ass, I know.

And perhaps I have been a little abrupt--"

"Well, a little," agreed Peggy.

"Do you mind," she added quickly, seeing him clutch desperately at a second palm-leaf in his agitation, "keeping to the leaf you have already spoiled?"

He dropped the worried leaf as though it had stung him, and half turned from her.