Black Sheep

aged your nephew, would she?'

'Oh, no! She wouldn't, and very likely Mary wouldn't either, but George, I feel, is another matter. Do enlighten me! Who are these people?'

She blinked. 'Who – ? Oh, I beg your pardon! I have been running on in the stupidest way! – talking to myself ! Selina is my eldest sister: we live together, in Sydney Place; Mary is my next sister: next in age, I mean; and George Brede is her husband. Never mind that! When did you run off with Celia?'

'Oh, when she became engaged to be married to Rowland!' he answered, very much as if this were a matter of course.

'Good God! Do you mean t

hat you abducted her?' she gasped.

'No, I don't recall that I ever abducted anyone,' he said, giving the matter his consideration. 'In fact, I'm sure of it. An unwilling bride would be the very devil, you know.'

'Well, that's precisely what I've always thought!' she exclaimed, pleased to find her opinion shared. 'Whenever I've read about it, in some trashy romance, I mean. Of course, if the heroine is a rich heiress the case is understandable, but – Oh! ' Consternation sounded in her voice; painfully mortified, she stammered: 'I beg your pardon! I can't think what made me say –'

'Not at all!' he assured her kindly. 'A very natural observation!'

'Do you mean to tell me that that was why you – you ran off with Celia?' she asked incredulously.

'Well, no! But you must remember that I was very young in those days: halflings seldom have an eye to the main chance. It was All for Love, or the World Well Lost. We fell passionately in love – or, at any hand, we thought we did. You know, this is a damned sickly story! Let us talk of something else!'

'I think it is a sad story. But I don't perfectly understand how

it was that Celia became engaged to my brother if she was in love with you?'

'Don't you? You should! Were you acquainted with Morval?'

She shook her head. 'I might perhaps have seen him, but I don't recall: I was only a child at that time. I know he was one of my father's closest friends.'

'Then you ought to be able to form a pretty accurate picture of him. They were as like as fourpence to a groat. The match was made between them. Celia was forbidden ever again to favour me with as much as a common bow in passing – mind you, I wasn't at all eligible – and ordered to accept Rowland's offer.'

'I understand her submission to the first order, but not to the second! I too submitted in a like case. It is not an easy matter to marry against the will of one's parents. But, with one's affections engaged, to accept another man's offer, merely because one's father wished it, is something I do not understand! If Celia was ready to elope with you she must have been a girl of spirit, too, and not in the least the meek, biddable creature we always thought her!'

'Oh, no, she hadn't an ounce of steel in her!' he said coolly. 'She was romantical, though, and certainly biddable: one of those pretty, clinging females who invariably yield to a stronger will! I hadn't the wit to perceive it, until the sticking point was reached, and she knuckled down in a flood of tears. And a very good thing she did,' he added. 'We might have carried it, if she had stood buff, and I should have been regularly in for it. I didn't think so at the time, of course, but I was never nearer to dishing myself. How did she deal with Rowland?'

He had stripped the affair of all its romantic pathos, but Abby could not help wondering whether his apparent unconcern hid a bruised heart. She answered his casual question reticently: 'I don't know. I wasn't of an age to know. She was always rather quiet, but she never appeared to be unhappy. I see now that she can't have loved Rowland, but I do know that she held him in the greatest respect. I mean, she depended wholly on his judgment, and was for ever saying Rowland says, as though that was a clincher to every argument!'

The slightly acid note on which she ended made him laugh. 'An opinion not shared by Abigail Wendover, I apprehend!'

'No!' she returned, her eyes kindling reminiscently. 'It was not shared by me! Rowland was a – ' She stopped, resolutely shutting her lips together.

'Rowland,' said Miles Calverleigh, stepping obligingly into the gap, 'was a pompous lobcock!'

'Yes!' said Abby, momentarily forgetting herself. 'That is exactly what he was! The most consequential, pot-sure –' Again she broke off short, adding hastily: 'Never mind that!'

'I don't – and it seems that Celia didn't either. No, she wouldn't, of course. You know, the more I think of it the more I feel that they must have been made for each other! Well, I'm glad to know she didn't fall into a green and yellow melancholy.'

Abby's brow was wrinkled. 'Yes, but – Did Rowland know of – of the elopement?'

'Oh, lord, yes!' He met her astonished look with a smile of pure derision. 'Come, come, ma'am! Where have your wits gone begging? Celia was an heiress! Consider, too, the scandal that would have attended a rupture of the engagement! People must have talked, and nothing could have been more obnoxious to a Wendover or a Morval! The affair had to be hushed up, and you must own that a very neat thing they made of it, between the four of them!'

'Four of them?'

'That's it: your father, Celia's father, my father, and

Rowland,' he explained.

'Respectability!' she ejaculated bitterly. 'Oh, how much I have detested that – that god of my father's idolatry! Did your father worship at the same altar?'