The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(48)

                “There is such a thing as being too modest and unassuming,” I answered. “It sometimes leads to unintentional cruelty.”

                “No, do you think so?” he cried, his face falling all at once. “I should blame myself bitterly if that were so. Dr. Cumberledge, you are her cousin. Do you gather that I have acted in such a way as to—to lead Miss Tepping to suppose I felt any affection for her?”

                I laughed in his face. “My dear boy,” I answered, laying one hand on his shoulder, “may I say the plain truth? A blind bat could see you are madly in love with her.”

                His mouth twitched. “That’s very serious!” he answered, gravely; “very serious.”

                “It is,” I responded, with my best paternal manner, gazing blankly in front of me.



                             He stopped short again. “Look here,” he said, facing me. “Are you busy? No? Then come back with me to my rooms; and—I’ll make a clean breast of it.”

                “By all means,” I assented. “When one is young—and foolish—I have often noticed, as a medical man, that a drachm of clean breast is a magnificent prescription.”

                He walked back by my side, talking all the way of Daphne’s many adorable qualities. He exhausted the dictionary for laudatory adjectives. By the time I reached his door it was not his fault if I had not learned that the angelic hierarchy were not in the running with my pretty cousin for graces and virtues. I felt that Faith, Hope, and Charity ought to resign at once in favour of Miss Daphne Tepping, promoted.

                He took me into his comfortably furnished rooms—the luxurious rooms of a rich young bachelor, with taste as well as money—and offered me a partaga. Now, I have long observed, in the course of my practice, that a choice cigar assists a man in taking a philosophic outlook on the question under discussion; so I accepted the partaga. He sat down opposite me and pointed to a photograph in the centre of his mantlepiece. “I am engaged to that lady,” he put in, shortly.

                “So I anticipated,” I answered, lighting up.

                He started and looked surprised. “Why, what made you guess it?” he inquired.

                I smiled the calm smile of superior age—I was some eight years or so his senior. “My dear fellow,” I murmured, “what else could prevent you from proposing to Daphne—when you are so undeniably in love with her?”

                “A great deal,” he answered. “For example, the sense of my own utter unworthiness.”

                “One’s own unworthiness,” I replied, “though doubtless real—p’f, p’f—is a barrier that most of us can readily get over when our admiration for a particular lady waxes strong enough. So this is the prior attachment!” I took the portrait down and scanned it.

                “Unfortunately, yes. What do you think of her?”



                             I scrutinised the features. “Seems a nice enough little thing,” I answered. It was an innocent face, I admit; very frank and girlish.

                He leaned forward eagerly. “That’s just it. A nice enough little thing! Nothing in the world to be said against her. While Daphne—Miss Tepping, I mean—” His silence was ecstatic.

                I examined the photograph still more closely. It displayed a lady of twenty or thereabouts, with a weak face, small, vacant features, a feeble chin, a good-humoured, simple mouth, and a wealth of golden hair that seemed to strike a keynote.