The girl was very amusing, he thought, when he found them at breakfast, and Mrs. Crombie said she had been telling about her university life, out there, and bade her go on.
" Oh, I don't believe Uncle Archibald will care for it," Lillias said, but she corrected herself so far as to add, " It is rather funny, I suppose, to you, off here." He liked her standing up so for her adoptive West, and he showed an immediate interest which inspired her. She was looking still prettier than the night before, and the flower-like freshness of her morning-dress was quite as becoming as the twilight tones which had clothed her as with a pensive music the night before. He tried to put out of his mind a saying to the effect that in the dark all cats are gray, while he found a singular pleasure in the pseudo-deference with which she addressed herself to him. "You see," she continued, "that my lectures are rather outside of the regular courses, and that was the reason why the general public was always more or less at them. I believe they were popular, but I knew all the time that they would have been more popular if they had been more — well, humbuggy. And you know I couldn't stand that, uncle," she appealed to him with a sidelong glance.
" No," he assented, in a way that made her laugh.
She went on: "People like that, both old and young, and I should have had all the unoccupied human material that goes into women's clubs raving about me, if I had done some sort of Delsarte business; they would have much preferred a song and dance to the modesty of nature which I was trying to brag up by precept and practice. I was tolerably adored by my classes, as it was, but I should have had them in ecstasies if I had descended to the cheap kind of things we were taught to avoid in the dramatic school."
"Yes," Crombie said, and now Lillias did not immediately continue.
When she did, it was to say, with a silently accumulated frankness, "The only one, really, that thoroughly understood, from the first instant, what I was driving at, was Mr. Craybourne. I suppose," she said, with another cast of her eyes, though this time it was rather defiant than appealing, towards Crombie, "Aunt Hester has told you about him?"
" Not at all! What about him?"
His effrontery made her laugh again.
" Oh, that's another story, as Kipling says — or used to say; I believe he doesn't say it now, anymore. This story only relates to his telling me, as soon as he could manage to get introduced — which he did by very properly waiting and asking the president to perform the ceremony, when he could have got any soul in the place to do it at once — that I was the first person to give him the least notion of what nature was at."
"Indeed!" Crombie said. "Did you believe him?"
" Not immediately. There's nothing," she deferred, " that we suspect so much as downright openness, is there?"
" It's often very misleading."
"Well, I found out afterwards that he really meant it. That," she added, after a distinct interval, " was what gave me pause," and Crombie felt that she had come to the other story. " There is no use beating about the bush, and I'm not going to. Aunt Hester," she now turned to Mrs. Crombie, "I may as well say first as last that if the Mellays hadn't providentially written to put me off a week I should have invented some providential excuse for coming to you and letting me meet Mr. Craybourne as nearly on the parental premises as I could get them."
Crombie stole a look at his wife, but he could detect nothing of resentment in her face; nothing but a generous and protecting welcome. She laid her left hand along the table towards the girl, and Lillias put hers gratefully into it. "You have done exactly right, my dear," she said, and Lillias went on, piecing a little break in her voice:
" Even if mother were on the ground, and not off in the wilds of Europe somewhere, I should wish Uncle Archie's approval, as I've no father of my own; for in the kind of scrambling life I've led I like to have a thing of this kind perfectly regular. I'm not the least bit bohemian, Aunt Hester, though I know you always thought me so — "
"No, my dear!" Mrs. Crombie protested, but Lillias tenderly insisted:
"Oh yes, you did, aunt, and I don't blame you; I should have, myself. But at heart I'm deadly respectable, and Mr. Craybourne's being an Englishman makes me all the more anxious to be more so; though he thinks the other kind of thing is charming, and was quite ready to be fetched by it — at least in my case. You see, I'm not having any concealments from you!"
"You needn't have, poor child!" Mrs. Crombie said, so tenderly that Crombie kept himself with difficulty from a derisory snort.
"And now you have the whole thing before you. I have come to you simply for a social basis, a domestic hearth, a family fireside, and when Mr. Craybourne comes, I want him to find me in a chimney-comer belonging to my own kith and kin."
The terms of this declaration, and the mixed tones in which it was delivered, were such as to make Crombie feel that it need not be taken too seriously, though it could not be taken too earnestly; so, when his wife, with an adjuratory frown, indicated that it was for him, as head of the house, to make their joint response, he said, with a certain hardy gayety:
"And when is he coming?"
"Oh, any moment!" Lillias said, with a rueful little smile full of gladness at his light daring. " That is, if one can judge from his already being here before me. I suppose I may say that it wasn't his fault that we are not here on our wedding journey."
She turned from her uncle to her aunt in making this observation, and Mrs. Crombie met it in the same spirit. "Well, Lillias, I must say that you have done very wisely in the whole matter. I should never have forgiven myself if any fancied inconvenience to us had kept you from coming to us in such an emergency; and no matter how it turns out, I shall write to Aggie that you have done everything that a girl could do."
"Thank you. Aunt Hester," and the two women had a moment of mothering and daughtering in which Crombie could not join them.
" Well, I am prepared to do anything you want," he said, with an ironical ease, and a genuine interest in the affair which he thought it more manly to conceal. "Do I understand that Mr. Craybourne will ask for me again?"
"Yes, indeed!" the girl said. "We are not out there now, and he knows it."
"And what am I to say, when he asks to see you — if he does?"
Lillias looked at her aunt, who visibly failed to formulate a line of conduct for Crombie, and then she looked back at him, and said, caressingly, "Oh, just trust to the inspiration of the moment, uncle."
"Then you leave it all to me?"
"Quite."
"Well, I've never had the chance of forbidding a young man my house before, and perhaps I sha'n't do it in just the way that this Mr. Craybourne is used to, but I think I can do it effectually."
Crombie wore the mustache of his period branching into the side whiskers of the early eighteen-sixties, and it was with a fine flare of both that he now tilted his head on one side and waited for his wife and niece to precede him out of the breakfast-room. His beard and the gossamer traces of his hair were faded from their earlier red to an agreeable yellowish white, and his bulging blue eyes matched very well with them and with a complexion of ancestral Scotch floridity, so that as he stood leaning forward with his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets he was such a fine elderly Du Maurier military type that Lillias could hardly forbear throwing him a kiss. She did forbear, but she forbore with a backward roll of her own eyes which had all the effect of a thrown kiss. "You'll be splendid. Uncle Archie, whatever you do," she encouraged him, though it made him tremble, almost, to see her put her arm round her aunt's waist. He felt that she might carry it too far in constituting herself Mrs. Crombie's protegee, and in fact he fancied Mrs. Crombie's waist tacitly stiffening under the caress.
To make sure, he asked her, when Lillias had gone up to her room for a moment, "Then you've changed your mind about her?"
"Not at all!" his wife returned, in the scorn often used by women to give dignity to a misstatement. " I