The Vision of Desire | Page 5

Tony Brabazon watched her consideringly while she poured out tea.
"Montricheux has been like a confounded desert to-day," he remarked
gloomily. He was obviously feeling very much ill-used. "Tell Lady
Susan she'll drive me to take the downward path if she monopolises
you like this."
"Tony, you've not been getting into mischief?"
Ann spoke lightly, but a faint expression of anxiety flitted across her
face as she paused, the teapot poised above her cup, for his answer.
He hesitated a moment, his eyes sullen, then laughed shortly.
"How could I get into mischief--my particular kind of mischief--in
Montricheux, with the stakes at the tables limited to five measly francs?
If we were at Monte, now--"
If Ann noticed his hesitation she made no comment on it. She finished
pouring out her tea.
"I'm very glad we're not," she said with decision. "You'd be too big a
handful for me to manage there."
"I've told you how you can manage me--if you want to," he returned
swiftly. "I'd be like wax in your hands if you'd marry me, Ann."
"I shouldn't care for a husband who was like wax in my hands, thank
you," she retorted promptly. "Besides, I'm not in the least in love with
you."

"That's frank, anyway."
"Quite frank. And what's more, you're not really in love with me."
Tony stiffened.
"I should think I'm the best judge of that," he said, haughtily.
"Not a bit. You're too young to know"--coolly.
A look of temper flashed into his face, but it was only momentary.
Then he laughed outright. Like most people, he found it difficult to be
angry with Ann; she was so transparently honest and sincere.
"I'm three years your senior, I'd have you remember," he observed.
"Which is discounted by the fact that you're only a man. All women are
born with at least three years' more common sense in their systems than
men."
Tony demurred, and she allowed herself to be led into a friendly
wrangle, inwardly congratulating herself upon having successfully
side-tracked the topic of matrimony. The subject cropped up
intermittently in their intercourse with each other and, from long
experience, Ann had brought the habit of steering him away from it
almost to a fine art.
He had been more or less in love with her since he was nineteen, but
she had always refused to take him seriously, believing it to be only the
outcome of conditions which had thrown them together all their lives in
a peculiarly intimate fashion rather than anything of deeper root. But
now that the boy had merged into the man, she had begun to ask herself,
a little apprehensively, whether she were mistaken in her assumption,
and she sometimes wondered if fate had not contrived to enmesh her in
a web from which it would be difficult to escape. Tony was a very
persistent lover, and unfortunately she was not free to send him away
from her as she might have sent away any other man.

Fond as she was of him, she didn't in the least want to marry him. She
didn't want to marry any one, in fact. But circumstances had combined
to give her a very definite sense of responsibility concerning Tony
Brabazon.
His father had been the younger son of Sir Percy Brabazon of Lorne,
and, like many other younger sons, had inherited all the charm and
most of the faults, and very little of the money that composed the
family dower. Philip, the heir, and much the elder of the two, pursued a
correct and uneventful existence, remained a bachelor, and in due
course came into the title and estates. Whereas Dick, lovable and
hot-headed, and with the gambling blood of generations of dicing,
horse-racing ancestors running fierily in his veins, fell in love with
beautiful but penniless Virginia Dale, and married her, spent and
wagered his small patrimony right royally while it lasted, and borrowed
from all and sundry when it was squandered. Finally, he ended a varied
but diverting existence in a ditch with a broken neck, while the horse
that should have retrieved his fortunes galloped first past the
winning-post--riderless.
Sir Philip Brabazon let fly a few torrid comments on the subject of his
brother's career, and then did the only decent thing--took Virginia and
her son, now heir to the title, to live with him.
It was then that Ann Lovell, who was a godchild of Sir Philip's, had
learned to know and love Tony's mother. Motherless herself, she had
soon discovered that the frailly beautiful, sad-faced woman who had
come to live with her somewhat irascible godparent, filled a gap in her
small life of which, hitherto, she had been only dimly conscious. With
the passing of the years came a clearer understanding of how much
Virginia's advent