Ann Veronica watched him from the dining-room window, and after
some moments of maidenly hesitation rambled out into the garden
in a reverse direction to Mr. Fortescue's steps, and encountered
him with an air of artless surprise.
"Hello!" said Ann Veronica, with arms akimbo and a careless,
breathless manner. "You Mr. Fortescue?"
"At your service. You Ann Veronica?"
"Rather! I say--did you marry Gwen?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
Mr. Fortescue raised his eyebrows and assumed a light-comedy
expression. "I suppose I fell in love with her, Ann Veronica."
"Rum," said Ann Veronica. "Have you got to keep her now?"
"To the best of my ability," said Mr. Fortescue, with a bow.
"Have you much ability?" asked Ann Veronica.
Mr. Fortescue tried to act embarrassment in order to conceal its
reality, and Ann Veronica went on to ask a string of questions
about acting, and whether her sister would act, and was she
beautiful enough for it, and who would make her dresses, and so
on.
As a matter of fact Mr. Fortescue had not much ability to keep
her sister, and a little while after her mother's death Ann
Veronica met Gwen suddenly on the staircase coming from her
father's study, shockingly dingy in dusty mourning and tearful
and resentful, and after that Gwen receded from the Morningside
Park world, and not even the begging letters and distressful
communications that her father and aunt received, but only a
vague intimation of dreadfulness, a leakage of incidental
comment, flashes of paternal anger at "that blackguard," came to
Ann Veronica's ears.
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