Sheila only laughed, and said, “I don’t understand myself sometimes.”

“Eh?  What?” he cried.  “Do you mean to say that I have married a conundrum?  If I have, I don’t mean to give you up, any way; so you may go and get me a biscuit and a drop of the whisky we brought from the North with us.”

CHAPTER XI.

THE FIRST PLUNGE.

Frank Lavender was a good deal more concerned than he chose to show about the effect that Sheila was likely to produce on his aunt; and when at length the day arrived on which the young folks were to go down to Kensington Gore, he had inwardly to confess that Sheila seemed a great deal less perturbed than himself.  Her perfect calmness and self-possession surprised him.  The manner in which she had dressed herself, with certain modifications which he could not help approving, according to the fashion of the time, seemed to him a miracle of dexterity; and how had she acquired the art of looking at ease in this attire, which was much more cumbrous than that she had usually worn in Borva?

If Lavender had but known the truth, he would have begun to believe something of what Ingram had vaguely hinted.  This poor girl was looking toward her visit to Kensington Gore as the most painful trial of her life.  While she was outwardly calm and firm, and even cheerful, her heart sank within her as she thought of the dreaded interview.  Those garments which she wore with such an appearance of ease and comfort had been the result of many an hour of anxiety, for how was she to tell, from her husband’s railery, what colors the terrible old lady in Kensington would probably like?  He did not know that every word he said in joke about his aunt’s temper, her peevish ways, the awful consequences of offending her, and so forth, were like so many needles stuck into the girl’s heart, until she was ready to cry out to be released from this fearful ordeal.  Moreover, as the day came near what he could not see in her she saw in him.  Was she likely to be reassured when she perceived that her husband, in spite of all his fun, was really anxious, and when she knew that some blunder on her part might ruin him?  In fact, if he had suspected for a moment that she was really trembling to think of what might happen, he might have made some effort to give her courage.

But apparently Sheila was as cool and collected as if she had been going to see John the Piper.  He believed she could have gone to be presented to the queen without a single tremor of the heart.

Still, he was a man, and therefore bound to assume an air of patronage.  “She won’t eat you, really,” he said to Sheila as they were driving in a hansom down Kensington Palace Gardens.  “All you have got to do is to believe in her theories of food.  She won’t make you a martyr to them.  She measures every half ounce of what she eats, but she won’t starve you; and I am glad to think, Sheila, that you have brought a remarkably good and sensible appetite with you from the Lewis.  Oh, by the way, take care you say nothing against Marcus Aurelius.”