Book 2 — CHAPTER IV (continued 2)

“I thought very fondly that you were without the curiosity of every woman,” said Michael. “Alas, you are not!”

“Michael, you’re perfectly horrid to me.”

“Don’t be too much the young wife,” he advised, with mocking earnestness.

“I won’t listen to anything you say, until I know where you’ve been. Of course, if I hadn’t been so busy, I could easily have found you out.”

“Not even can you sting me into the revelation of my hiding-place,” Michael laughed.

“You shan’t stay with us at Hardingham unless you tell me.”

“By the time you come back from your honeymoon, I may have wonderful news,” said Michael. “Oh, and by the way, where are you going for your honeymoon? It sounds absurd to ask such a question at this hour, but I’ve never heard.”

“We’re going to Compiègne,” said Stella. “I wrote to little Castéra-Verduzan, and he’s lent us the cottage where you and I stayed.”

That choice of Stella’s seemed to mark more decisively than anything she had said or done his own second place in her thoughts nowadays.

When the bride and bridegroom were gone, Michael sat with his mother, talking.

“I had arranged to go to the South of France with Mrs. Carruthers,” she told him. “But if you’re going to be here, I could put her off.”

Michael felt rather guilty. He had not considered his mother’s loneliness, and he had meant to return at once to Leppard Street.

“No, no, I’m going away again,” he told her.

“Just as you like, dearest boy.”

“You’re glad about Stella?”

“Very glad.”

“And you like Alan?”

“Of course. Charming—charming.”

The firelight danced in opals on the window-panes, and the macaw who had been brought up to Mrs. Fane’s sitting-room out of the way of the wedding guests sharpened his beak on the perch.

“It’s really quite chilly this afternoon,” said Mrs. Fane.

“Yes, there’s a good deal of mist along the river,” said Michael. “A pity that the fine weather should have broken up. It may be rather dreary in the forest.”

“Why did they go to a forest?” she asked. “So like Stella to choose a forest in November. Most unpractical. Still, when one is young and in love, one doesn’t notice the mud.”

Next day Mrs. Fane went off to the South of France, and Michael went back to Leppard Street.