“‘It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’” replies Lavinia, cheerfully, but with conscious effort, and with the feeling, often before experienced, that a good deal of physical fatigue attends living over the crater of Etna.” “He calmed down after a while. I spent all the bad language I was master of, and wished it had been more, upon the whole Prince clan; and that did him good, so much so that he was able by-and-by to talk of something else.” “Of what else?” The question is an idle one, and Miss Carew is conscious of it. So is Rupert. “I expect that you know,” he answers quietly. Never until to-day has Lavinia felt _gêne_ in the presence of her lifelong playfellow and comrade, and that she should do so now strikes her as so monstrous an anomaly that it must be treated drastically. “About our marriage, do you mean?” she inquires, taking the bull by the horns, and looking him full in the face. “Yes.” “H’m!” Struggle as she may, her lips can produce nothing more forthcoming than the monosyllable. “He asked me whether the engagement still existed?” “So he did me.” “Whether we had any intention of fulfilling it?” “Ditto!” “Whether it was essential to our happiness?” “Essential to our happiness,” repeats she, as if it were a dictation lesson. “He said that we were all that he had left in the world.” Lavinia nods, speech seeming difficult. Is Rupert going to recapitulate, in his father’s unsparing Saxon, the reason for that father’s anxiety to see them wed? She waits in rosy dread. It is a moment or two before relief comes. “He ended by adjuring me not to marry you in order to please him. I think I was able to reassure him as to that not being my primary inducement.” They know each other far too well for her not to be instantly aware of an alteration in his voice--not to have an instant’s flashed certainty that the playmate, the comrade, the brother-cousin, is gone, and that the lover stands full-fledged in their stead before her. Whether the conviction causes her pain or pleasure, she could not tell you. She only feels as she has done in the morning, but a thousandfold more so, that the situation is overpoweringly _odd_. “Well!” she says slowly, afraid to look away from him, lest she should never again be able to lift her stupidly rebellious eyes to his. “I suppose it was bound to come, some time or other?” It is not an effusive mode of acquiescence. “Have you nothing more to say about it?” If she had had any doubt as to the final banishment out of her life of the boy-comrade, the method of this question, and a certain reproachful enterprise divined in the asker’s eye, would have banished it. “What more is there to say?” she returns in troubled haste. “What more than we have been saying all our lives, in a way?” Then, with a sudden impulsive throwing herself on his judgment and mercy, “I suppose we _do_ feel all right, don’t we?” CHAPTER VI “I love nothing so well as you! Is not that strange?”