She answered something under her breath, which he construed to be "Yes."

She had been feeling the cruelty of it all, that their last hour together should be taken up by talking of commonplaces. At the sudden change in his tone--although it was unhappy, there was pa.s.sion in it, and the chill seemed to pa.s.s away from her heart--the tears filled her eyes, overflowed them, ran warmly down her cheeks.

At the sight of those tears the young man forgot everything, except that she was lovely and he loved her and she was crying for him. He leaped to her side and dropped on his knees. He put both his arms about her and pressed her closely to him.

"Are you crying because I am going, my darling?" he said. "Good heavens!

don't cry--I'm not worth it. And yet I shall remember, when the world is between us, that you cried because I was going, you angel of mercy."

An older woman than Nelly might have had the presence of mind to ask him why he was going. But she was silent. She felt it over-whelmingly sweet to be held so, to feel his hand smoothing her hair. The bunch of lilies of the valley she had been wearing was crushed between his breast and her breast. The sweetness of them rose up as something exquisite and forlorn. His hand moved tremblingly over her hair to her cheek.

"Give me a kiss, Nelly," he said, "and I will go. Just one kiss. I shall never have another in all my days. Good-bye, my heart's delight."

For a second their lips clung together. Then his arms relaxed. He put her down gently into a chair. She lay back with closed eyes. She heard the door shut behind her. Then she sprang to her feet, realising that he was gone and it was too late to recall him.

Why should he go? she asked herself, as, with trembling hands, she arranged the disorder of her hair. Then the merely conventional came in, as it will even at such tense moments. She asked herself how she would look to his sister, if she appeared at this moment; to the maid, who might be expected at any moment bringing in the lamp. The room was dark but for the firelight. How would she look, with her tear-stained visage and the disorder of her appearance? She could not sit and make small talk. That was a heroism beyond her. And she was afraid to speak to anyone lest she should break down. She adopted a cowardly course.

Afterwards she must explain it to Mrs. Rooke somehow. She put the consideration of how out of sight: it could wait till the turmoil of her thoughts was over.

She stole from the room, let herself out quietly, and was grateful for the dark and the cool, frosty air. About five minutes after she had gone Mrs. Rooke came in laden with small parcels.

"The Captain and Miss Drummond are in the drawing-room, ma'am," said the maid.

"Then you can bring tea."

Mrs. Rooke opened the drawing-room door leisurely, turning the handle once or twice before she did so. She was excited at the thought of the things that might be happening the other side of the door. Supposing that Nelly had discovered that life with a poor foot-captain was a more desirable thing than life with a well-endowed baronet, a coming man in the political world to boot! Supposing--there was no end to the suppositions that pa.s.sed through Mrs. Rooke's busy brain in a few seconds of time. Then--she entered the room and found emptiness.

"You are sure that neither the Captain nor Miss Drummond left a message?" she said to the maid who brought the tea.

"Quite sure, ma'am. I had no idea they were gone."

"Do you suppose they went away together, Jane?"

Mrs. Rooke was ready to accept a crumb of possible comfort from her handmaid.

"I do remember now, ma'am, that when I was pulling down the blind upstairs I heard the hall-door shut twice. I never thought of looking in the drawing-room, ma'am. I made sure that the noise of the blinds had deceived me into taking next-door for ours."

"Ah, thank you, Jane, that will do."

The omens were not at all propitious. Mrs. Rooke was fain to acknowledge as much to herself dejectedly. Nor did Cyprian think them propitious when taken into counsel. When she went downstairs, she found that her brother had come in. He was to spend the last evening at his sister's house.

Captain Langrishe's face, however, did not invite questions. He made no allusion at all to the happenings of the afternoon, and his sister felt that she could not ask him. She had a heavy heart for him as she bade him good-night, although she called something after him with a cheerful pretence about their rendezvous next morning.

"It _is_ nine-thirty at Fenchurch Street, isn't it?" she asked.

"Do you think you will ever manage it, Bel?" Captain Langrishe smiled at her haggardly.

"Oh, yes, easily--by staying up all night," she answered.

But her heart was as heavy as lead for him.

CHAPTER XV

THE GENERAL HAS AN IDEA

When Sir Denis came home from his club that evening he learned that Miss Nelly had gone to bed with a headache.

Pat, who told him, looked away as he gave the information, as though he did not believe in his own words. Miss Nelly with a headache! Why, G.o.d bless her, she had never had such a thing, not from the day she was born! To be sure, the whole affectionate household knew that there was some cloud over Miss Nelly. They didn't talk much about it. Pat and Bridget knew better than to have the servants' hall gossiping over the master and Miss Nelly. A new under-housemaid, who was greatly addicted to the reading of penny novelettes, suggested that Miss Nelly was being forced into marrying her cousin by the machinations of his mother, who was not _persona grata_ with the servants' hall. But Pat had nipped the young person's imaginings in the bud.

"She may be contrairy enough to give the General the gout in his big toe and the twisht in his timper, as often she's done. But she can't make our Miss Nelly marry where she don't like. If you'd put your romantic notions into your scrubbin' now, Miss Higgs; but I suppose it's your name is the matter with you, and you can't help it."

The under-housemaid, whose name happened to be Gladys Higgs, was reduced to tears by this remark, and the tears brought the kind-hearted Pat to repentance for his hastiness.

"Whatever the d.i.c.kens came over me," he imparted to Bridget when they were having a snack of bread and cheese between meals in the room allotted to the cook, who was now also housekeeper, "to go sharpenin' my tongue on that foolish little girl? It isn't for you an' me to be makin'

fun of their quare names. 'Tis no credit to us if we have elegant names in the counthry we come from."

"Aye, indeed. Where would you find pleasanter thin MacGeoghegan or McGroarty or Magillacuddy? There was a polisman in our town by the name of McGuffin. I always thought it real pleasant."

"Sure what would be on the little girl?--'tis Miss Nelly, I mean," said Pat, in a manner that showed his real anxiety. "She scared me, so she did, with her nonsense, that Gladys. For it stands to reason that Miss Nelly wouldn't mind marryin' Sir Robin--isn't he the fittest match for her?--if it wasn't that there might be someone else. And who could it be, I ask you, unbeknownst to us that has watched over her from a babby?"

"You're a foolish man to be takin' that much notice of that Gladys girl and her talk. Why shouldn't Miss Nelly have a headache? Why, I remember the Miss O'Flahertys, Lord Dunshanbo's daughters, when I was a little girl; and 'twas faintin' on the floor they were every other minute and everyone havin' to run and cut their stay-laces. They were fifty, too, if they were a day, so they ought to have had more sense. Why wouldn't Miss Nelly have Quality ways?"

"Young ladies aren't like that nowadays," Pat said dolefully. "'Tis the bicycle and the golf. They've no stay-laces to cut, so they don't go faintin' away. And Miss Nelly, poor lamb, she'd never be thinkin' of doing such a thing."

He went off sorrowfully, shaking his head. The mysteriousness of the change in Miss Nelly perturbed him the more. He looked away from the General when he gave the information about the headache.

"Miss Nelly said, sir," he volunteered, "that she was to be called, unless she was asleep, when you came home to dinner. Shall I send up f.a.n.n.y to call her?"

"Not for worlds," said the General. "I'll go myself. She mustn't be disturbed, poor child, if she has a headache."

He went upstairs softly, pursing out his lips as he went along in troubled thought. He opened the door of his daughter's room, and spoke her name in a whisper. There was not a sound.

"Fast asleep," he said, with a sigh, as he went to his dressing-room to dress for dinner. That was something he would not have omitted for any possible calamity that could befall him.

He ate his dinner in lonely state. Bridget had done her best by way of expressing her sympathy, but he ate without his usual enjoyment.

"Sure," said Pat afterwards, "he didn't know but what it was sawdust he was atin' instead of that beautiful volly-vong of yours. He could barely touch the mutton, and a beautiful little joint it was. Sure, there's a sad change come over the house, anyway."

The General gave orders that Miss Nelly was not to be disturbed again that night. After dinner he retired to his den and made a pretence of reading the papers, but his heart wasn't in it. He missed even a speech of Robin's which would have enraged him in happier times. He sat turning over the sheets and sighing to himself now and again; only when Pat came in with a pretence of replenishing the fire--it was Pat's way of showing his silent sympathy--was the General absorbed in his newspaper. Not that it imposed on Pat, who mentioned afterwards to Bridget that he didn't believe the master knew a word of what he was looking at.

About half-past nine the General relinquished that pretence of reading.

He felt the house to be nearly as sad as though someone were lying dead in it, and he could support it no longer. He must find out what was the matter with the child, or at least show her how her old father's heart bled for her. He got up quietly from his big easy-chair, from which he had been used to survey his Nelly's face at the other side of the fireplace for many a happy year. To be sure, it had not been the same since the Dowager had come, and Nelly had gone gadding of evenings.

Still, she had always come in to kiss him before she went off, looking radiant and sweet, with the hood of her evening cloak over her bright head and framing the dearest face in the world. She had always clung to him with her soft arms about his neck, and he had not minded her absence since she was enjoying herself as she ought at her age.

He climbed up the stairs of the high house. Nelly had chosen a bedroom right at the top, whence she could look away over the London roofs to the mists that hid the country.

The blinds were up and the cold winter moon lay on the girl's bed. The General came in tip-toe, trying to avoid creaking on the bare boards, which Nelly preferred to carpets. But his precaution was unnecessary.