"Oh dear no! We're not engaged! You don't understand! Private engagements are not the proper thing in France. It isn't done. _Oh_ no! Why, his mother would write to my mother and then he would send a bouquet, or something, and then----" "A bouquet! By Jove! Why, you're more prehistoric than Aunt William! Well, look here, if this little blighter keeps his place I shan't interfere. But, mind you, if I see the smallest sign of----" He rose to his feet. "Of what?" said Dolly, rising and looking angry. "He's a nice, handsome, polite, dear boy. So there!" "I should only wring his neck, that's all. Good-bye, old girl." They walked to the gate together. "It's only for your good, you know, Dolly. I don't mean to be a brute." "Oh, it's all right, Savile." "Dolly, dear." "Yes, Savile." "I'm awfully fond of you, really." "Of course, I know, dear boy. Come again when you can, won't you?" "_Won't_ I?" said Savile. CHAPTER V ARTHUR MERVYN AT HOME Sometimes Sir James would confide in his secretary, and become after dinner--he drank port--pompously communicative on the subject of the alliances his daughter might contract--if she would. As he became more and more confidential in fact, he would grow more and more distant in manner, so that if they began dinner like old friends, they seemed gradually to cool into acquaintances; and at the end of the evening--such an evening!--Woodville felt as if they had barely been introduced, or had met, accidentally, in a railway train. Yet he courted these _tête-à-tête_ as one perversely courts a certain kind of suffering. At least, Sir James talked on the _only_ interesting subject, and Woodville was anxious to know everything about his rivals; for, though he believed in Sylvia's affection, he was subject to acute, almost morbid, attacks of physical jealousy. To see other men admire her was torture, particularly as he had to efface himself and be treated by her father as a faithful vassal. And he really disliked deceiving Sir James, whose open liking was evident and who thought him matrimonially as much out of the question as the gardener. "Hang it all, Woodville's a gentleman!" Sir James would have cried furiously at any suggestion that it was imprudent to leave the young man and Sylvia so much together. Sir James always remembered that Woodville was a gentleman and forgot that he was a man. Men who indulge in inexpensive cynicism say that women are complex and difficult to understand. This may be true of an ambitious and hard woman, but nothing can be more simple and direct than a woman in love.