Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/186

178 they'll have. Then at the eleventh hour she finds it will never do. It will be too "marked"! Marked it would certainly have been,' Lady Orville pursued. 'But there would have been a remedy!'

'For her to have stayed away?'

Her ladyship waited. 'What horrors you make me say!'

'Well,' Mackern replied, 'I'm glad she came. I particularly want her.'

'You?—what have you to do with her? You're as bad as she!' his hostess added, quitting him, however, for some other attention, before he had need to answer.

He sought no second companion—he had matter for thought as he went on; but he reached the door of the church before Mrs. Despard had gone in, and he observed that when, glancing back, she saw him pass the gate, she immediately waited for him. She had turned off a little into the churchyard, and as he came up he was struck with the prettiness that, beneath the old grey tower and among the crooked headstones, she presented to the summer morning.

'It's just to say, before any one else gets hold of you, that I want you, when we come out, to walk home with me. I want most particularly to speak to you.'

Comme cela se trouve! Mackern laughed. 'That's exactly what I want to do to you!'

'Oh, I warn you that you won't like it; but you will have, all the same, to take it!' Mrs. Despard declared. 'In fact, it's why I came,' she added.

'To speak to me?'

'Yes, and you needn't attempt to look innocent and interesting. You know perfectly what it's about!' With which she passed into church.

It scarce prepared the young man for his devotions; he thought more of what it might be about—whether he knew or not—than he thought of what, ostensibly, he had come for. He was not seated near Mrs. Despard, but he appropriated