“If we’re not married—­if I go home without you—­it’s what’ll be on everybody’s lips.”

“But it won’t be true,” she said, with a little gasp.

He laughed.  “That won’t matter.  It’s how it’ll look.”

“Oh, looks!”

“It’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?  It’s what makes the difference.  I shall figure as a cad.”

He spoke as one who makes an astounding discovery.  She was inexpressibly shocked.

“Oh, but you couldn’t,” was all she could find to say, but she said it with conviction.

[Illustration:  “THERE’S NO ONE WHO WON’T BELIEVE BUT THAT I—­THREW YOU OVER.”]

He laughed again.  “You’ll see.  There’s no one—­not my best friends—­not my mother—­not my sisters—­who won’t believe—­whatever you and I may say to the contrary—­who won’t believe but that I—­threw you over.”

A toss of his hand, a snap of his fingers, suited the action to the word.

Her color came and went in little shifting flashes.  She moved a pace or two aimlessly, restively.  Her head went high, her chin tilted.  When she spoke her voice trembled with indignation, but she only said: 

“They couldn’t believe it long.”

“Oh, couldn’t they!  The story would follow me to my grave.  Things like that are never forgotten among fellows so intimate as soldiers.  There was a chap in our regiment who jilted a nice girl at the Cape—­sailed for home secretly only a week before the wedding.”  He paused to let her take in the dastardly nature of the flight.  “Well, he rejoined at the depot.  He stayed—­but he didn’t stay long.  The Rangers got too hot for him—­or too cold.  The last I ever heard of him he was giving English lessons at Boulogne.”

The flagrancy of the case gave her an advantage.  “It’s idle to think that that kind of fate could overtake you.”

“The fate that can overtake me easily enough is that as long as I live they’ll say I chucked a girl because she’d had bad luck.”

She was about to reply when the click of the latch of the gate diverted her attention.  Drusilla Fane, attended by Davenant, was coming up the hill.  Seeing Olivia and Ashley at the end of the lawn, Drusilla deflected her course across the grass, Davenant in her wake.  Her wide, frank smile was visible from a long way off.

“This is not indiscretion,” she laughed, as she advanced; “neither is it vulgar curiosity to see the lion.  I shouldn’t have come at all if mother hadn’t sent me with a message.”

Wearing a large hat a la Princesse de Lamballe and carrying a long-handled sunshade which she held daintily, like a Watteau shepherdess holding a crook, Drusilla had an air of refined, eighteenth-century dash.  Knowing the probability that she disturbed some poignant bit of conversation, she proceeded to take command, stepping up to Olivia with a hasty kiss.  “Hello, you dear thing!” Turning to Ashley, she surveyed him an instant before offering her hand.  “So you’ve got here!  How fit you look!  What sort of trip did you have, and how did you leave your people?  And, oh, by the way, this is Mr. Davenant.”