I laughed. “There’s a crowning task for your diplomacy, Sir Paget!”
“If I could change the hearts of women, I should be a wizard, not a diplomatist. Their feuds have a grand implacability beside which the quarrels of nations are trivial and transient affairs. In this matter, I’m a broken reed—don’t lean upon me, Julius! And could you answer for your side—for your fair belligerent?”
“Lucinda makes war by laughing,” said I, laughing myself. “But—well, I think she would go on laughing, you know.”
“Just what my Lady Dundrannan always hates, and occasionally suspects—even in me!”
“I wish to blazes that Waldo would have one of his old rages, and tell her it’s not her business!”
“I daresay he may wish you hadn’t taken so much interest in his runaway _fiancée_,” was Sir Paget’s pertinent retort. “No, he’ll have no rages; like you, I sometimes regret it. If she vetoes, he’ll submit.” He shook his head. “Here are we poor men up against these grand implacabilities; they transcend our understanding and mock our efforts. Even Arsenio, the great Arsenio, though he made use of them, tripped up over them in the end! What can you and I, and poor Waldo, do?” He got up. “I’ll write a line to Waldo on the point—on the two points—to-night; and send it up by the car to-morrow; he can let us know his answer before Stannard is due here, with the deeds, in the afternoon. There might even be time to telephone and stop him from starting, if the answer’s a veto!”
Diplomatist though Sir Paget was, man of affairs as I must assume myself to be—or where stands the firm of Coldston’s?—our judgments were clumsy, our insight at fault; we did no justice to the fine quality of Lady Dundrannan’s pride. It was not to be outdone by the pride of the needlewoman of Cimiez—outwardly, at all events; and do not many tell us that wholly to conquer, or even conceal, such emotions as fear and self-distrust is a moral triumph, where not to feel them is a mere fluke of nature—just the way one happens to be concocted? The only answer that came to Sir Paget’s no doubt very delicately, diplomatically expressed note, came over the telephone (Sir Paget had not trusted its secrecy!), from butler to butler. Marsden at Briarmount told Critcher at Cragsfoot that he was to inform Sir Paget that Colonel Rillington said it was all right about this afternoon. Critcher delivered the message as Sir Paget and I were sitting in the garden before lunch—on that bench by the garden door whereon Lucinda had once sat, listening fearfully to the quarrel of angry youths.