"There, run and look at yourself," he commanded, and she trotted away to an oval glass which hung on the wall between the long windows. As she moved, Cheniston passed the remaining earring to his sister.
"What do you say, Chloe--is it a suitable present for her ladyship!"
Chloe took up the little trinket with a rather dubious air.
"Somehow I don't think I can fancy Iris wearing earrings," she said; and Bruce, who had a respect for his sister's opinion which she herself did not suspect, looked rueful.
"But, Chloe, why not? You always wear them?"
"Certainly I do." As a matter of fact she did, and the pearls or sapphires which she affected were as much a part of her personality as her black hair or her narrow blue eyes. "But then Iris is a different sort of person. She is younger, more natural, more unsophisticated; and I'm not quite sure whether these pretty things will suit her charming face."
"Oh!" Bruce's own face fell, and for once Chloe felt an impulse of compassion with another's disappointment.
"At any rate they are very dainty and girlish," she said, handing back the case. "I congratulate you on your taste, Bruce. You might very easily have got more elaborate ones--like some of mine--which would have been very inappropriate to a girl."
"Why do you always speak of yourself as though you were a middle-aged woman, Chloe?" asked her brother with a sudden curiosity. "You seem to forget you are younger than I--why, you are only twenty-six now."
"Am I?" Her smile was baffling. "In actual years I believe I am. But in thought, in feeling, in everything, I am a hundred years older than you, Bruce."
Cherry's return to her uncle's side with a request to him to take out "the dangly thing what tickles my ear" cut short Bruce's reply, and breakfast proceeded tranquilly, while the sun shone gaily and the roses for which Cherry Orchard was famous scented the soft, warm air which floated in through the widely-opened windows.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Anstice was in a quandary on this beautiful summer morning.
Before he had pledged his word to Cheniston to stand aside and leave the field open to his rival, he had gladly accepted Iris' invitation to her birthday dinner and dance; but the thought of the dances she had promised him had changed from a source of anticipatory delight to one of the sheerest torment.
It had not been easy to avoid her. There had been hours in which he had had to restrain himself by every means in his power from rushing over to Greengates to implore her pardon for his discourtesy, and to beg her to receive him back into her most desirable favour. It had cost him an effort whose magnitude had left him cold and sick to greet her distantly on the rare occasions of their meeting; and many times he had been ready to throw his promise to the winds, to repudiate the horrible bargain he had struck, and to tell her plainly in so many words that he loved her and wanted her for his wife.