A Poached Peerage Part 3

"Fish have been known to wriggle back into the water after they were hooked, played and landed," Dagmar observed sagaciously. She turned to the window. "Here he comes," she remarked coolly. "I advise you to fling him a little farther from the bank." She raised her voice to greet the half-hearted Philander. "Here we are, Mr. Sharnbrook. Come in!"

Mr. Sharnbrook thereupon came in, somewhat with an air of looking as though he would much rather not. He was a florid young man, of no strikingly apparent intellectual powers: he had straw-coloured hair parted in the middle, and a downy moustache to match. Apart from an aggressive riding suit his appearance was diffident to the verge of chronic apology.

"Left off raining," he remarked, in a vain desire to meet his enemies in the open.

"Has it?" replied Dagmar, indifferently doubtful. "Fancy your finding us here," she added disingenuously.

"Quite a surprise," he observed, with equal dissimulation.

"A pleasant surprise, I should hope. Aren't you going to speak to Ethel?"

Thus prompted, Mr. Sharnbrook was fain to advance and greet the lady whom for the last week he had been dodging. "How do you do?" he said with timid cordiality.

"How awfully gushing," laughed the voluble Miss Dagmar. "Of course, I'm in the way," she added significantly. "All right; I'll look out of the window."

"Oh, not at all," protested the miserable Sharnbrook. "Please don't."

"Oh, but I shall," she insisted. "I am interested in that delightful old market woman who has just driven in. Tell me when I may turn round."

"Now," said Sharnbrook, desperately bold.

"Dagmar, don't be absurd," protested her sister, with a provocative glance at her jibbing lover.

"I can't see behind me," Dagmar observed casually.

"None of your tricks, Dagmar," said Ethel, facing the wretched young man, and then turning her head as though to look at her sister, which manoeuvre had the intended effect of giving John Arbuthnot Sharnbrook a magnificent oscillatory opportunity.

But though the way was plain the will was absent. "No, no," protested the gentleman, hanging off; "I'm up to her game. You won't catch me, Miss Dagmar. She has only got to turn her head," he pointed out confidentially to Ethel.

"Oh, she won't--just yet," the lady murmured softly. "She had better not," she added, with a meaning smile.

"We had better not," suggested the harried Sharnbrook at his wits' end, desperately determined not to compromise himself before a witness.

"Oh, just as you please," returned Miss Ethel, with a disgusted toss of her head. "If you are so frightened."

"Oh, well," he urged feebly; "I don't want to make a fool of myself."

"Oh, it is not necessary," the disappointed maiden returned with scorn.

"You may look, Dagmar."

"I didn't see anything," remarked that lady, with a malicious twinkle in her sharp eyes.

"No," said Sharnbrook, manifestly relieved; "I don't see how you could.

So the new Lord Quorn is coming down to the Towers," he added, eager to change the subject.

"Yes," replied Dagmar glibly, wickedly rejoicing at Ethel's discomfiture. "We are expecting him now. Of course we haven't an idea what he is like. Frightfully colonial, no doubt."

"We've heard nothing of Lady Quorn," remarked Ethel, determined not to be behindhand in chatter, and so show her indifference to the love pa.s.sage that did not come off.

Sharnbrook gave a smile of superior knowledge.

"There is no Lady Quorn," he said.

The effect of his announcement was startling. "No Lady Quorn?" the eager sisters cried in chorus, their expressions indicating design tempered with incredulity.

"Quorn's a bachelor," Sharnbrook maintained, beginning to see light behind the dark cloud which for the past fortnight had hung over him.

Miss Ethel turned to her sister with indignant reproach. "Dagmar! You said he was married."

"I--I understood father to say he was," that disingenuous young lady replied unblushingly.

Ethel, well acquainted with her sister's resourcefulness, turned from her in evident disgust. "Are you quite sure, Mr. Sharnbrook?" she inquired with purposeful determination to clutch the truth.

"I saw it in the paper," the now brightening youth answered. "There certainly was a report that he was married, or engaged, or something of that sort; but it turns out to be a mistake. He's a young chap, about thirty."

"How interesting!" Ethel murmured.

"Is he good-looking?" Dagmar inquired, with a suggestion of appropriating the new-found peer if he should be fortunate enough to touch her standard of beauty.

"Can't say," Sharnbrook smirked. "Sure to be if he's a lord," he added, with cheap sarcasm.

Dagmar crossed to Ethel and slapped her on the shoulder. "My chance, my dear; you're booked," she said in a determined undertone.

Ethel gave a repudiatory "Pooh!" and pushed her away. Dagmar walked serenely to the window. "I wonder if that is his lordship coming up the street?" she exclaimed suddenly.

Ethel ran to the window. "Where? Which?"

There was no one in view at the moment who could be supposed by any stretch of imagination to come up to even an unconventional idea of a peer of the realm, nevertheless the sanguine Dagmar pushed her sister away. The first sight of the waiting coronet was for her alone.

"Never you mind, Ethel," she said roughly, "I am quite competent to look out for him. You amuse yourself with Mr. Sharnbrook."

Mr. Sharnbrook meanwhile was experiencing some difficulty in arranging a decent veil over his satisfaction. "By Jove, they've jumped at Quorn," he told himself gleefully. "If only--I say, Ethel," he said with sudden affection, to test the new phase of the situation.

Ethel pushed away the arm which had recklessly found its way round her, until lately inviting, waist.

"Don't be absurd, Mr. Sharnbrook," she protested snappishly.

"I shouldn't have been absurd just now," he retorted pointedly.

"You didn't take your chance, and you've lost it." The fact that she turned haughtily away prevented her seeing an uncomplimentary look of joyful relief in her recalcitrant lover's face. If only this Lord Quorn were a decent fellow and would back him up.

"What a time father is at that stupid club," Dagmar exclaimed impatiently. "And we have got to go to Babbleton. We've no excuse for not going now the rain has so provokingly stopped."

"Let's go and rout father out, and get back soon," Ethel suggested, not a whit behind her in eagerness.

"Come along, then, dear," said Dagmar, giving a preparatory look at herself in the gla.s.s. "Aren't you going to take your young man with us?" she added with a view to her sister's annoyance.

"Oh, you don't want to come, do you, Mr. Sharnbrook?" Ethel said with a somewhat obvious lack of cordiality.

"To Babbleton? Not exactly," replied the wary Sharnbrook with so much fervour that Dagmar laughed unpleasantly. His princ.i.p.al desire now was to get into the middle of a ten-acre field and sing a paean.