Mr. Kennaston paused, with a slight air of apology.
"If I were you," he suggested, pleasantly, "I would move a little—just a little—to the left. That will enable you to obtain to a fuller extent the benefit of the sunbeam which is falling—quite by accident, of course—upon your hair. You are perfectly right, Margaret, in selecting that hedge as a background. Its sombre green sets you off to perfection."
He went away chuckling. He felt that Margaret must think him a devil of a fellow.
She didn't, though.
"The idea of his suspecting me of such unconscionable vanity!" she said, properly offended. Then, "Anyhow, a man has no business to know about such things," she continued, with rising indignation. "I believe Felix Kennaston is as good a judge of chiffons as any woman. That's effeminate, I think, and catty and absurd. I don't believe I ever liked him—not really, that is. Now, what would Billy care about sunbeams and backgrounds, I'd like to know! He'd never even notice them. Billy is a man. Why, that's just what father said yesterday!"
Margaret cried, and afterward laughed happily. "I suppose old people are right sometimes—but, dear, dear, they're terribly unreasonable at others!"
Having thus uttered the ancient, undying plaint of youth, Miss Hugonin moved a matter of two inches to the left, and smiled, and waited contentedly. It was barely possible some one might come that way; and it is always a comfort to know that one is not exactly repulsive in appearance.
Also, there was the spring about her; and, chief of all, there was a queer fluttering in her heart that was yet not unpleasant. In fine, she was unreasonably happy for no reason at all.
I believe the foolish poets call this feeling love and swear it is divine; however, they will say anything for the sake of an ear-tickling jingle. And while it is true that scientists have any number of plausible and interesting explanations for this same feeling, I am sorry to say I have forgotten them.
I am compelled, then, to fall back upon those same unreliable, irresponsible rhymesters, and to insist with them that a maid waiting in the springtide for the man she loves is necessarily happy and very rarely puzzles her head over the scientific reason for it.
XXI
But ten minutes later she saw Mr. Woods in the distance striding across the sunlit terraces, and was seized with a conviction that their interview was likely to prove a stormy one. There was an ominous stiffness in his gait.
"Oh, dear, dear!" Miss Hugonin wailed; "he's in a temper now, and he'll probably be just as disagreeable as it's possible for any one to be. I do wish men weren't so unreasonable! He looks exactly like a big, blue-eyed thunder-cloud just now—just now, when I'm sure he has every cause in the world to be very much pleased—after all I've done for him. He makes me awfully tired. I think he's very ungrateful. I—I think I'm rather afraid."
In fact, she was. Now that the meeting she had anticipated these twelve hours past was actually at hand, there woke in her breast an unreasoning panic. Miss Hugonin considered, and caught up her skirts, and whisked into the summer-house, and there sat down in the darkest corner and devoutly wished Mr. Woods in Crim Tartary, or Jericho, or, in a word, any region other than the gardens of Selwoode.
Billy came presently to the opening in the hedge and stared at the deserted bench. He was undeniably in a temper. But, then, how becoming it was! thought someone.
"Miss Hugonin!" he said, coldly.
Evidently (thought someone) he intends to be just as nasty as possible.
"Peggy!" said Mr. Woods, after a little.
Perhaps (thought someone) he won't be very nasty.
"Dear Peggy!" said Mr. Woods, in his most conciliatory tone.
Someone rearranged her hair complacently.
But there was no answer, save the irresponsible chattering of the birds, and with a sigh Billy turned upon his heel.
Then, by the oddest chance in the world, Margaret coughed.
I dare say it was damp in the summer-house; or perhaps it was caused by some passing bronchial irritation; or perhaps, incredible as it may seem, she coughed to show him where she was. But I scarcely think so, because Margaret insisted afterward—very positively, too—that she didn't cough at all.
XXII
"Well!" Mr. Woods observed, lengthening the word somewhat.
In the intimate half-light of the summer-house, he loomed prodigiously big. He was gazing downward in careful consideration of three fat tortoise-shell pins and a surprising quantity of gold hair, which was practically all that he could see of Miss Hugonin's person; for that young lady had suddenly become a limp mass of abashed violet ruffles, and had discovered new and irresistible attractions in the mosaics about her feet.
Billy's arms were crossed on his breast and his right hand caressed his chin meditatively. By and bye, "I wonder, now," he reflected, aloud, "if you can give any reason—any possible reason—why you shouldn't be locked up in the nearest sanatorium?"
"You needn't be rude, you know," a voice observed from the neighbourhood of the ruffles, "because there isn't anything you can do about it."
Mr. Woods ventured a series of inarticulate observations. "But why?" he concluded, desperately. "But why, Peggy?—in Heaven's name, what's the meaning of all this?"
She looked up. Billy was aware of two large blue stars; his heart leapt; and then he recalled a pair of gray-green eyes that had regarded him in much the same fashion not long ago, and he groaned.
"I was unfair to you last night," she said, and the ring of her odd, deep voice, and the richness and sweetness of it, moved him to faint longing, to a sick heart-hunger. It was tremulous, too, and very tender. "Yes, I was unutterably unfair, Billy. You asked me to marry you when you thought I was a beggar, and—and Uncle Fred ought to have left you the money. It was on account of me that he didn't, you know. I really owed it to you. And after the way I talked to you—so long as I had the money—I—and, anyhow, its very disagreeable and eccentric and horrid of you to object to being rich!" Margaret concluded, somewhat incoherently.
She had not thought it would be like this. He seemed so stern.
But, "Isn't that exactly like her?" Mr. Woods was demanding of his soul. "She thinks she has been unfair to me—to me, whom she doesn't care a button for, mind you. So she hands over a fortune to make up for it, simply because that's the first means that comes to hand! Now, isn't that perfectly unreasonable, and fantastic, and magnificent, and incredible?—in short, isn't that Peggy all over? Why, God bless her, her heart's bigger than a barn-door! Oh, it's no wonder that fellow Kennaston was grinning just now when he sent me to her! He can afford to grin."
Aloud, he stated, "You're an angel, Peggy that's what you are. I've always suspected it, and I'm glad to know it now for a fact. But in this prosaic world not even angels are allowed to burn up wills for recreation. Why, bless my soul, child, you—why, there's no telling what trouble you might have gotten into!"
Miss Hugonin pouted. "You needn't be such a grandfather," she suggested, helpfully.
"But it's a serious business," he insisted. At this point Billy began to object to her pouting as distracting one's mind from the subject under discussion. "It—why, it's——"
"It's what?" she pouted, even more rebelliously.
"Crimson," said Mr. Woods, considering—"oh, the very deepest, duskiest crimson such as you can't get in tubes. It's a colour was never mixed on any palette. It's—eh? Oh, I beg your pardon."