"Well, I mean vulgar, noisy people."

He shook his head in a way that ruffled his halo of silver hair, and laughed.

"You should not be a sn.o.b," he teased. "After all, you are marrying the son of peasants."

"Peasants are different," she insisted, a little sulkily.

"Peasants are picturesque only in books, my dear. As for me, I like happy people, and even your English 'noisy and vulgar' ones are happy, I suppose, when they come up here on Sunday. Some day you and I will come again. And bring Theo," he added suddenly.

Then he rose. "Come, we had better start to walk back." She obeyed in silence.

"If I had not had genius," he continued as they reached the bottom of the slope and turned homewards, "I should be now--what? A Norman peasant in a black blouse driving, probably, a char-a-bancs to sell my fruit--or my corn. I could never have been a gamekeeper like my father, for I cannot kill. And if you, then, had come to Falaise and gone to the market, you might have bought a pennyworth of cherries of me. And all this might have been if I had not, one day, heard an old half-witted blind man play a cracked fiddle on the high road, thirty years ago!"

She frowned, for she hated this kind of talk. It was too true, and it hurt her baser pride, even while her n.o.bler pride rejoiced in the very humbleness of his origin because it emphasised his present greatness.

"But--you are you, and I am only--me," she returned, ungrammatical but proudly humble.

He turned, his face flushing brilliantly. "Then you are proud of me?" he cried.

Danger again. After a long pause, which visibly hurt him, she returned with a smile, "Of course I am. Who would not be proud of such a father-in-law?"

Half an hour later it was all over, the wonderful day was finished, and to Brigit's amazement she was more than a little glad. It had been delightful, but it had been full of danger.

In time Joyselle would learn to evade these pitfalls, with which their future seemed to bristle, but as yet he was so unused to avoiding things in his path that it was almost a miracle that she had, as she put it with a half-whimsical, half-despairing smile, got him safely home without an outburst.

She was, had been from the first, fairly sure of herself, but she was wise enough to acknowledge that her strength depended largely on his. If he had broken down, she knew that the odds were largely against her being able, in her inevitable despair over his certain-to-follow good-bye, to continue to hide her own feelings. And after that, she believed, he would never see her again.

So it was with a strong feeling of relief that she said good-bye to him, half-way home, and went on alone.

As the hansom started again she turned and looked back. Joyselle stood, hat in hand, where she had left him, his face, now that he believed himself to be unseen by her, black with thought. Then, with the so familiar jerk of his head, he put on his hat, smiled, and marched off down the street.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

One afternoon, a few days later, Tommy Kingsmead burst into his sister's room where she was sitting writing.

"I say, Bick----"

"h.e.l.lo, little boy, what's the matter?"

Tommy shrugged his shoulders in close imitation of Joyselle.

"I don't know, but something is. Very. It's--Theo!"

She started. "Theo? He isn't ill, is he?"

"No, no. He's downstairs; wants to see you. There's been some kind of a row in Golden Square. _Pet.i.te mere_ and the Master have been talking for an hour, as hard as ever they can talk, and Theo is upset, and the Master has gone off in a tearing rage--do go down and find out, Brigit, and then come back and tell me."

Lord Kingsmead's pristine curiosity regarding everything with which he came into contact had by no means suffered eclipse since he had been living in London.

Devoted as he was to Joyselle and to his music, the little boy's pa.s.sion for knowledge of all kinds seemed to increase, and there was in his small, pale, pointed face a strained, overkeen look that troubled his sister at times. Now, however, she had no leisure to think of it, and hurried downstairs to the drawing-room, where she found Theo walking restlessly up and down.

"Brigit," he burst out abruptly, as she came in, "when will you marry me?"

"Good gracious, Theo--what--what has put that into your head?" she parried ineffectively, sitting down, as he did not offer to give her any further greeting.

"Into my head? Has it ever been out of it? I am sorry to have startled you, dear," he continued, more gently, sitting down by her and taking her hands in his, "but surely I have been patient. And--I am tired of waiting."

She sat with bent head, looking at their joined hands. His hands were smaller and whiter than his father's, but very like them in shape. If they had been Joyselle's! If he had been able to come to her with that question: "When will you marry me?"

"You are very good," she said slowly, after a long pause.

"Then--?"

"Suppose you tell me why this sudden frenzy of haste?"

He hesitated. "Well--we have been engaged nearly eight months--and I love you, dear."

But she remembered Tommy's story and persisted.

"Surely, though, something must have happened to-day? You were quite content yesterday."

He flushed. "_Eh bien, oui._ It is that my grandmother has written. In September is to be their Golden Wedding. They are very old, and--they want--me to bring my wife to them. Brigit," he added, his boyish face flushing with antic.i.p.atory pink, "may I not do it?"

She rose and went to the window, her temples beating violently. For weeks Theo had played such a subordinate _role_ in her mind, owing as much to his native modesty as to her absorption in his father, that his mood of to-day came to her as a shock. After all, put the thought away, forget the inevitable future in an almost hysterical enjoyment of the present, as she would, it must be faced some time. Could she possibly marry this boy whom her sentimental contemporaneousness with his father naturally seemed to relegate to a generation younger than herself?

It would be horrible, unnatural. A husband, be he ever so modern, and his wife ever so unruly, is in the nature of things more or less a master, whereas, she realised with a flash of very miserable amus.e.m.e.nt, she would, if displeased with him, feel less inclined to use wifely diplomacy than to box his ears. Emphatically, she had hopelessly outgrown him. Then, what should she do?

If she refused him now, what would be his father's att.i.tude? She did not know. A week ago Joyselle would have hated her--or thought that he did, which is practically the same thing _pro tem_.

But now! Now that the violinist had had time to face and measure his own pa.s.sion, would he not realise the futility of trying to force one's inclinations in such matters? Again she could only shake her head; she was out of her depth. Meantime, behind her, Theo was waiting for his answer. Suddenly the horrors of the situation seemed to burst on her from all sides. What had she done? Accepted this boy because he had money, and because she disliked her mother and her mother's friends; then she had, finding that she loved her future father-in-law, deliberately torn from his eyes the veil of family sentiment that had protected him from her, and later, when he had by an accident learned that she was to be loved, and that he loved her, she had by an ign.o.ble trick kept him in England, refusing to let him play the decent part he had chosen. What was she, then, to have done this abominable and traitorous thing?

"Brigit--is it so--horrible to you?"

There was in his voice something like a repressed sob, and she had an extravagant horror of melodrama. If he wept she would, she knew, lose her temper.

"Listen, Theo. I--I will tell you to-night. I mean, I'll set a date.

Only you must go now. I--I have an engagement."

"Then----"

"Then you are a goose to be so upset! I must think it over. I know I'm queer and--rather horrid, but--I have not changed. You knew what I was when you asked me to marry you. And--I never pretended to be--romantic, did I?"

He watched her dumbly. She had never looked to him more beautiful than at that moment in her simple blue frock, her hands behind her, her eyes almost deprecating. He rose with an effort. "All right, then. To-night.

Thank you, Brigit."