“Congratulate me—?  On what?” asked Beatrice.

“On what, indeed!” cried the vivacious Irishwoman.  “Don’t try to pull the wool over the eyes of an old campaigner like me.”

Beatrice looked blank.

“I can’t in the least think what you mean,” she said.

“Get along with you,” cried Mrs. O’Donovan Florence; and she brandished her sunshade threateningly.  “On your engagement to Mr.—­what’s this his name is?—­to be sure.”

She glanced indicatively down the lawn, in the direction of
Peter’s retreating tweeds.

Beatrice had looked blank.  But now she looked—­first, perhaps, for a tiny fraction of a second, startled—­then gently, compassionately ironical.

“My poor Kate!  Are you out of your senses?” she enquired, in accents of concern, nodding her head, with a feint of pensive pity.

“Not I,” returned Mrs. O’Donovan Florence, cheerfully confident.  “But I ’m thinking I could lay my finger on a long-limbed young Englishman less than a mile from here, who very nearly is.  Hasn’t he asked you yet?”

“Es-to bete?” Beatrice murmured, pitifully nodding again.

“Ah, well, if he has n’t, it’s merely a question of time when he will,” said Mrs. O’Donovan Florence.  “You’ve only to notice the famished gaze with which he devours you, to see his condition.  But don’t try to hoodwink me.  Don’t pretend that this is news to you.”

“News!” scoffed Beatrice.  “It’s news and nonsense—­the product of your irrepressible imagination.  Mr. What’s-this-his-name-is, as you call him, and I are the barest acquaintances.  He’s our temporary neighbour—­the tenant for the season of Villa Floriano—­the house you can catch a glimpse of, below there, through the trees, on the other side of the river.”

“Is he, now, really?  And that’s very interesting too.  But I wasn’t denying it.”  Mrs. O’Donovan Florence smiled, with derisive sweetness.  “The fact of his being the tenant of the house I can catch a glimpse of, through the trees, on the other side of the river, though a valuable acquisition to my stores of knowledge, does n’t explain away his famished glance unless, indeed, he’s behind with the rent:  but even then, it’s not famished he’d look, but merely anxious and persuasive.  I’m a landlord myself.  No, Trixie, dear, you’ve made roast meat of the poor fellow’s heart, as the poetical Persians express it; and if he has n’t told you so yet with his tongue, he tells the whole world so with his eyes as often as he allows them to rest on their loadstone, your face.  You can see the sparks and the smoke escaping from them, as though they were chimneys.  If you’ve not observed that for yourself, it can only be that excessive modesty has rendered you blind.  The man is head over ears in love with you.  Nonsense or bonsense, that is the sober truth.”

Beatrice laughed.

“I ’m sorry to destroy a romance, Kate,” she said; “but alas for the pretty one you ’ve woven, I happen to know that, so far from being in love with me, Mr. Marchdale is quite desperately in love with another woman.  He was talking to me about her the moment before you arrived.”