Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/477

Rh Tom, you know who it is you have heard me speak often enough of Cyril. I am going to marry Tom in three weeks’ time,” she said, laughing.

“The devil you are!” I exclaimed involuntarily.

“If he will have me,” she added, quite as a playful afterthought.

Tom was a well-built fair man, smoothly, almost delicately tanned. There was something soldierly in his bearing, something self-conscious in the way he bent his head and pulled his moustache, something charming and fresh in the way he laughed at Emily’s last preposterous speech.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

“Why didn’t you ask me?” she retorted, arching her brows.

“Mr. Renshaw,” I said. “You have out-manœuvred me all unawares, quite indecently.”

“I am very sorry,” he said, giving one more twist to his moustache, then breaking into a loud, short laugh at his joke.

“Do you really feel cross?” said Emily to me, knitting her brows and smiling quaintly.

“I do!” I replied, with truthful emphasis.

She laughed, and laughed again, very much amused.

“It is such a joke,” she said. “To think you should feel cross, now, when it is—how long is it ago?”

“I will not count up,” said I.

“Are you not sorry for me?” I asked of Tom Renshaw.

He looked at me with his young blue eyes, eyes so bright, so naïvely inquisitive, so winsomely