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Updated: June 16, 2025
I nearly blurted out the truth about mine, which would have got me into hot water at once, as Ellaline's hardly nineteen and I'm practically twenty-one worse luck for you. By this time the Mock Dragon had walked slowly on, but the brown image in "native" dress had glued himself to the platform near by, too respectful to be aware of my existence.
I hate to be reminded of what I'm built on, and can't bear to look in the glass after seeing a skull, with or without cross-bones. In this second cave, when Mrs. Norton was putting an appropriate prehistoric question I'd coached her up to ask her brother, I linked a friendly arm in Ellaline's, and bore her off under convoy. "What a sweet, illuminated stalactite curtain!" said I, rapturously.
I suppose they drowned their sorrows in it while working in the tin mines one always associates with them. We go to Tintagel to-morrow, and do some other Cornish things, I don't know what. But write to me at Bideford, as we shall be back in Devonshire in a few days on our way I fancy toward Wales. I long to hear what you or Lady Mac may have up your sleeves about the dear Ellaline's papa.
She might even be tempted to hint something distressing to this poor girl, if the child vexed her by any thoughtless little extravagance; whereas I wouldn't for a good deal have Ellaline's daughter guess she owes anything to me.
Yet I can see you looking puzzled as well as startled, and muttering to yourself: "Take Ellaline's place? Where how when?" I was like that myself while she was trying to explain. I stared with an owlish stare for about five minutes, until her real idea in all its native wildness, not to say enormity, burst upon me.
That Ellaline's father had once been a friend of mine, and that her mother had been my cousin, though a French girl. "Oh!" said Mrs. Senter, as if suddenly enlightened. "Is she by any chance the daughter of a Frederic Lethbridge?" What she recalled about Fred Lethbridge, I can't guess. She isn't old enough to have known him, unless as a child or a very young girl.
Even though I am a child in his eyes, I am a dear child; and though it can't last, it does make me happy to be dear to him, in any way at all this terrible Dragon of Ellaline's. But that isn't the end of our conversation. The real end was an anti-climax, perhaps, but I liked it. For that matter, the tail of a comet's an anti-climax.
I gasped like a fish out of water, and wriggled my neck in a silly way, which a charitable man, unaccustomed to women, might take for schoolgirl gawkishness in a spasm of acquiescence. Instantly he put out his hand and wrung mine extremely hard. It would have crunched the real Ellaline's rings into her poor little fingers. "You must forgive me," he said.
Senter and Dick I had to be more wary; for the lady, no doubt because she is my guest, feels it polite to give me a good deal of her society; and Dick naturally considers that Ellaline's time is wasted on me, especially when he isn't by to alleviate the boredom. My one chance was to lure the girl out early, for neither Mrs. Senter nor Burden loves the first morning hours.
It's well enough to say that the rain rains alike on the just and the unjust, but that is not true, as some women's hair curls naturally. Ellaline's does, and mine doesn't except the part I owe for at Truefitt's.
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