He looked at her impish face blandly, then took out his cigarette case, chose a cigarette carefully, lit it, and smoked with placid enjoyment.
"Cross?" she asked, in a few minutes.
"Not in the least. Merely wondering if I might tell you the truth."
"I wouldn't," said Elizabeth. "Fiction is always stranger and more interesting. By the way, are you to be permanently at the Foreign Office now?"
"I haven't the least notion, but I shall be there for the next few months. When do you go to London?"
In the spring, she told him, probably in April, and added that her Aunt Alice had been a real fairy godmother to her.
"Very few ministers' daughters have had my chances of seeing men and cities. And some day, some day when Buff has gone to school and Father has retired and has time to look about him, we are going to India to see the boys."
"You have a very good time in London, I expect," Arthur said. "I can imagine that Aunt Alice makes a most tactful chaperon, and I hear you are very popular."
"'Here's fame!'" quoted Elizabeth flippantly. "What else did Aunt Alice tell you about me?"
Arthur Townshend put the end of his cigarette carefully into the ash-tray and leant forward.
"You really want to know—then here goes. She told me you were tall—like a king's own daughter; that your hair was as golden as a fairy tale, and your eyes as grey as glass. She told me of suitors waiting on your favours——"
Elizabeth dropped her knitting with a gasp.
"If Aunt Alice told you all that—well, I've no right to say a word, for she did it to glorify me, and perhaps her kind eyes and heart made her think it true; but surely you don't think I am such a conceited donkey as to believe it."
"But isn't it true?—about the suitors, I mean?"
"Suitors! How very plural you are!"
"But I would rather keep them in the plural," he pleaded; "they are more harmless that way. But Aunt Alice did talk about some particular fellow—I think Gordon was his wretched name."
"Bother!" said Elizabeth. "I've dropped a stitch." She bent industriously over her knitting.
"I'm waiting, Elizabeth."
"What for?"
"To hear about Mr. Gordon."
"Oh! you must ask Aunt Alice," Elizabeth said demurely. "She is your fount of information." Then she threw down her knitting. "Arthur, don't let's talk any more about such silly subjects. They don't interest me in the least."
"Is Mr. Gordon a silly subject?"
"The silliest ever. No—of course he isn't. Why do you make me say nasty things? He is only silly to me because I am an ungrateful creature. I don't expect I shall ever marry. You see, I would never be a grateful wife, and it seems a pity to use up a man, so to speak, when there are so few men and so many women who would be grateful wives and may have to go without. I think I am a born spinster, and as long as I have got Father and Buff and the boys in India I shall be more than content."
"Buff must go to school soon," he warned her. "Your brothers may marry; your father can't be with you always."
"Oh, don't try to discourage me in my spinster path. You are as bad as Aunt Alice. She thinks of me as living a sort of submerged existence here in Glasgow, and only coming to the surface to breathe when I go to London or travel with her. But I'm not in the least stifled with my life. I wouldn't change with anybody; and as for getting married and going off with trunks of horrid new unfamiliar clothes, and a horrid new unfamiliar husband, I wouldn't do it. I haven't much ambition; I don't ask for adventures; though I look so large and bold, I have but a peeping and a timorous soul."
She smiled across at Arthur, as if inviting him to share her point of view; but he looked into the fire and did not meet her glance.
"Then you think," he said, "that you will be happy all your life—alone?"
"Was it Sydney Smith who gave his friends forty recipes for happiness? I remember three of them," she counted on her fingers, "a bright fire, a kettle singing on the hob, a bag of lollipops on the mantelshelf—all easy to come at. I can't believe that I shall be left entirely alone—I should be so scared o' nights. Surely someone will like me well enough to live with me—perhaps Buff, if he continues to have the contempt for females that he now has; but anyway I shall hold on to the bright fire and the singing kettle and the bag of lollipops."
She sat for a moment, absent-eyed, as if she were looking down the years; then she laughed.
"But I shall be a frightfully long gaunt spinster," she said.
Arthur laughed with her, and said:
"Elizabeth, you aren't really a grown-up woman at all. You're a schoolboy."
"I like that 'grown-up,'" she laughed; "it sounds so much less mature than the reality. I'm twenty-eight, did you know? Already airting towards spinsterhood."
Arthur shook his head at her.
"In your father's words, you are an absurd creature. Sing to me, won't you? seeing it's my last night."
"Yes." She went to the piano. "What shall I sing? 'A love-song or a song of good life'?"
"A love-song," said Arthur, and finished the quotation. "'I care not for good life.'"
Elizabeth giggled.
"Our language is incorrigibly noble. You know how it is when you go to the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford? I come away so filled with majestic words that I can hardly resist greeting our homely chemist with 'Ho! apothecary!' But I'm not going to sing of love. 'I'm no' heedin' for't,' as Marget says.... This is a little song out of a fairy tale—a sort of good-bye song:
'If fairy songs and fairy gold
Were tunes to sell and gold to spend,
Then, hearts so gay and hearts so bold,
We'd find the joy that has no end.
But fairy songs and fairy gold
Are but red leaves in Autumn's play.
The pipes are dumb, the tale is told,
Go back to realms of working day.
The working day is dark and long,
And very full of dismal things;
It has no tunes like fairy song,
No hearts so brave as fairy kings.
Its princes are the dull and old,
Its birds are mute, its skies are grey;
And quicker far than fairy gold
Its dreary treasures fleet away.
But all the gallant, kind and true
May haply hear the fairy drum,
Which still must beat the wide world through,
Till Arthur wake and Charlie come.
And those who hear and know the call
Will take the road with staff in hand,
And after many a fight and fall,
Come home at last to fairy-land.'"
* * * * *
They were half-way through breakfast next morning before Buff appeared. He stood at the door with a sheet of paper in his hand, looking rather distraught. His hair had certainly not been brushed, and a smear of paint disfigured one side of his face. He was not, as Mr. Taylor would have put it, looking his "brightest and bonniest."
"I've been in Father's study," he said in answer to his sister's question, and handed Arthur Townshend the paper he carried.