Three Weeks

She was the parson's daughter--and is still for the matter of that!--and often in those days between her games of golf and hockey, or a good run on her feet with the hounds, she came up to Verdayne Place to write Lady Henrietta's letters for her. Isabella was most amiable and delighted to make herself useful.

And if her hands were big and red, she wrote clearly and well. The Lady Henrietta, who herself was of the delicate Later Victorian Dresden China type, could not imagine a state of things which contained the fact that her god-like son might stoop to this daughter of the earthy earth!

Yet so it fell about. Isabella read aloud the sporting papers to him--Isabella played piquet with him in the dull late afternoons of his convalescence--Isabella herself washed his dog Pike--that king of rough terriers! And one terrible day Paul unfortunately kissed the large pink lips of Isabella as his mother entered the room.

I will draw a veil over this part of his life.

The Lady Henrietta, being a great lady, chanced to behave as such on the occasion referred to--but she was also a woman, and not a particularly clever one. Thus Paul was soon irritated by opposition into thinking himself seriously in love with this daughter of the middle classes, so far beneath his noble station.

"Let the boy have his fling," said Sir Charles Verdayne, who was a coarse person. "Damn it all! a man is not obliged to marry every woman he kisses!"

"A gentlemen does not deliberately kiss an unmarried girl unless he intends to make her his wife!" retorted Lady Henrietta. "I fear the worst!"

Sir Charles snorted and chuckled, two unpleasant and annoying habits his lady wife had never been able to break him of. So the affair grew and grew! Until towards the middle of April Paul was advised to travel for his health.

"Your father and I can sanction no engagement, Paul, before you return," said Lady Henrietta. "If, in July, on your twenty-third birthday, you still wish to break your mother's heart--I suppose you must do so. But I ask of you the unfettered reflection of three months first."

This seemed reasonable enough, and Paul consented to start upon a tour round Europe--not having spoken the final fatal and binding words to Isabella Waring. They made their adieux in the pouring rain under a dripping oak in the lane by the Vicarage gate.

Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little distance, but for the lady's scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to distinguish her sex.