She laughed. “So it seems by the look of you!”
“Look at that big fellow!” she thought, “who fears neither man, death, nor devil, nor God much to speak of, routed by one flash of feeling from an unexpected quarter. The creatures can’t stand the unexpected at all, they are intrinsically conventional! If that fool had a glimmer of sense in him, he would have given the poor little woman a hug, and have let her have a comfortable easy howl for once in her life. I suppose she is doing problems with the old fossil in the library instead.”
Dacre felt his size frightfully, and began to contrast it mentally with the Sevres cup in his hand. He set it down, and towering huge above Mrs. Fellowes, delivered himself of another solemn asseveration as to the impossibility of staying one day longer.
“My dear boy, I am quite convinced,” she said, “if you did, your country must infallibly burst up.”
“No more it is! Sit down, Dacre, I have to shout to make my voice reach you up there, and yours comes down on me like a thousand bricks. What do you want me to do?”
He gave a sigh of relief and settled down comfortably.
“I want you to go and see her, and—oh, you know best then what to do. Don’t you think—I don’t know, but perhaps if you were to take her out for a walk or something.—Oh, good-bye, Mrs. Fellowes, and thanks, thanks, most awfully!”
Mrs. Fellowes watched him swing along down the drive, then pull up with a jerk to speak to her husband who was coming up, then swing off again out of sight.
“Poor old Dacre! But why didn’t he kiss her, the fool? I suppose he wasn’t ‘game’.”
She put some fresh tea into the pot and set her kettle on the little spirit lamp to boil up.
“Has Dacre been making you a declaration of unlawful love?” said the Rector when he came in. “He had precisely that air.”
“Worse than that a thousand times. His mother looked like crying, and was on the point of breaking out into sudden and condign maternal affection. Dacre fled incontinently. He is going to make a precipitate retreat to his regiment, and he came to plant me in the breach. The longer one lives, the less one thinks of the courage of your sex.”
“Want of experience makes cowards of us all. You couldn’t expect the fellow to face the unknown!”