The Vision of Desire | Page 5

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 had meant to her, and ultimately no bond between actual mother and daughter could have been stronger than the bond which had subsisted between these two.
It was to Ann that Virginia confided her inmost fears lest Tony should follow in his father's footsteps. From Sir Philip, choleric and tyrannical, she concealed them completely--and many of Tony's youthful escapades as well, paying some precocious card-losses he sustained while still in his early teens out of her own slender dress allowance in preference to rousing his uncle's ire by a knowledge of them. But with Ann, she had been utterly frank.
"Tony's a born gambler," she told her. "But he has a stronger will than his father, and if he's handled properly he may yet make the kind of man I want him to be. Only--Philip doesn't know how to handle him."
The last two years of her life she had spent on a couch, a confirmed invalid, and oppressed by