The Nonesuch

“Yes, that’s right, Lizzie,” corroborated Courtenay. “I’m just off—and I’ll tell you what! I’ll get an umbrella to shield you from the sun, even if I have to steal one! So just you stay quietly in the taproom with Miss Trent until I return! I shan’t be gone much above an hour, I hope.”

“An hour?” exclaimed Tiffany. “And what am I to do, pray? Do you imagine I’m going to sit in that odious, stuffy taproom for a whole hour? I won’t!”

“Oh, so it’s odious and stuffy now, is it?” said Courtenay. “I thought you said you wouldn’t care a rush if you were obliged to spend the rest of the day in it? Yes, you can look daggers at me if you choose, but I know what you are, and that’s a selfish little cat! You never did care a button for anyone but yourself, and it’s my belief you never will!”

Tiffany burst into tears; and Miss Colebatch, sympathetic tears starting to her own eyes, cried: “Oh, Courtenay, no! You mustn’t—It is all my fault for being so stupid! Oh, Tiffany, I beg your pardon!”

“You beg her pardon?” ejaculated Courtenay.

“Mr Underhill, will you please mind your tongue?” said Miss Trent, with all the authority of her calling. “Stop crying, Tiffany! If you don’t care to stay here, I suggest you ride into Bardsey with your cousin. Then you may enjoy your quarrel without making the rest of us uncomfortable!”

Courtenay opened his mouth, encountered a quelling look, and shut it again.

“I won’t!” sobbed Tiffany. “I hate Courtenay, and I don’t want to go to Bardsey!”

Miss Trent, well aware of the ease with which Tiffany could lash herself into a fit of hysterics, cast a harassed look round in search of support. Lindeth, his lips rather firmly compressed, and his eyes lowered, neither spoke nor moved; but the Nonesuch, amusement in his face, strolled up to Tiffany, and said: “Come, come, my child! The beautiful Miss Wield with swollen red eyes? Oh, no, I beseech you! I couldn’t bear to see it!”

She looked up involuntarily, hiccupping on a sob, but with her tears suddenly checked. “Swollen—Oh, no! Oh, Sir Waldo, are they?”

He put a finger under her chin, tilting up her face, and scrutinizing it with the glinting smile so many females had found fascinating. “Thank God, no! Just like bluebells drenched with dew!”

She revived as though by magic. “Are they? Oh, how pretty!”

“Ravishing, I promise you.”

She gave a delighted little trill of laughter. “I mean how prettily said!”

“Yes, wasn’t it?” he agreed, carefully drying her cheeks with his own handkerchief. “What very long eyelashes you have! Do they ever become tangled?”

“No! Of course they don’t! How can you be so foolish? You are trying to flatter me!”

“Impossible! Don’t you wish to ride to Bardsey?”

Her face clouded instantly. “With Courtenay? No, I thank you!”

“With me?”

“With you! But—but you are not going—are you?”

“Not unless you do.”

A provocative smile lilted on her lips. “Ancilla wouldn’t permit it!” she said with a challenging glance cast at her preceptress.

“What, even though Courtenay goes with us?” He turned towards Miss Trent, interrogating her with one quizzical eyebrow. “What do you say, ma’am?”

She had been listening to this interchange with mixed feelings, torn between gratitude to him for averting a storm, and indignation at the unscrupulous methods he employed. Her answering look spoke volumes, but all she said was: “I am persuaded Mrs Underhill would raise no objection, if her cousin is to go with Tiffany.”

“Then I’ll go and saddle the horses again,” he said. “You, Julian, will remain to keep watch and ward over the ladies!”

“Of course,” Julian replied quietly.

“Unless you should choose instead to accompany us?” suggested Tiffany, blithely forgetting that it had been agreed that two defenceless females could not be abandoned in an alehouse.

“No, I thank you,” he said, and turned from her to persuade Miss Colebatch, with his sweetest smile, to retire again into the taproom.

Miss Trent had seen the look of shocked dismay in his face when it had been so forcibly borne in upon him that his goddess had feet of clay; and her heart was wrung with pity. She might tell herself that his well-wishers might rejoice in his disillusionment, but she was conscious of an irrational and almost overpowering impulse to find excuses for Tiffany. She subdued it, strengthened by the saucy look her artless charge cast at Julian before she tripped off in Sir Waldo’s wake. It was abundantly plain to her that Tiffany saw nothing in Julian’s refusal to ride to Bardsey but an expression of jealousy, which in no way displeased her. Tiffany delighted in setting her admirers at loggerheads, and never wasted a thought on the pain she inflicted; and had she been told that Julian was as much hurt by his cousin’s behaviour as by hers she would have been as incredulous as she was uncaring. But Miss Trent’s heart had more than once been wrung by the puzzled look in Julian’s eyes when he had watched Sir Waldo flirting with Tiffany, and she could not help longing to reassure him.