Part 24 (1/2)
”Just as well, perhaps. We're all delighted about it, but they're both young enough to wait a little while,” Lady Isabel smilingly made the best of it. ”Next year will be quite time enough to settle anything.”
Her serenity was the obvious outcome of an extreme contentment.
Alex found herself better able to regard herself in the light of one betrothed in her mother's company than in that of Noel. He treated her almost exactly as he had always done, with cheerful good-fellows.h.i.+p, and only at the very outset of the engagement with any tinge of shyness in his bearing.
”Of course, I ought to have got a ring,” he said very seriously, ”but I don't believe in taking any chances, and so, just in case there was any hitch, I waited. Besides, I don't know what you like best--you'll have to choose.”
Alex smiled at the words. There was a glamour about such a choice, even beyond that with which her own sense of the romantic perforce enveloped it.
She wondered whether she would be allowed to go with Noel to a jeweller's, or whether he would, after all, choose his token alone, and bring it to her, and place it on her finger with one of those low, ardently-spoken sentences which she could hear so clearly in her own mind, and which seemed so strangely and utterly impossible in Noel's real presence.
But the arrival of Noel's ring, after all, took her by surprise.
He had been lunching with them in Clevedon Square, when the jeweller's a.s.sistant was announced, just as Lady Isabel was rising from the luncheon-table.
She turned enquiringly.
”Noel?”
”I told him to come here. I thought you wouldn't mind. You see, I want Alex to choose her ring.”
”Oh, my dear boy! how very exciting! But may we see too?”
Mrs. Cardew was also present.
”Oh, rather,” said Noel heartily. ”We shall want your advice.”
They all trooped hastily into the library, where the man was waiting, with the very large a.s.sortment of gleaming rings ordered for inspection by Noel.
”What beauties!” said Lady Isabel. ”But, really, I don't know if I ought to let him.”
She glanced at Mrs. Cardew, who said in a very audible voice:
”Of course. He's so happy. It's quite delightful to watch them both.”
She was looking hard and appraisingly at the rings as she spoke.
Alex looked at them too, quite unseeing of their glittering magnificence, but acutely conscious that every one was waiting for her first word.
”Oh, how lovely!” she exclaimed faintly.
She chid herself violently for the sick disappointment that invaded her, not, indeed, at the matter, but at the manner of the gift.
And yet she realized dimly, that it was impossible that it should have happened in any other way--that any other way, indeed, would have been as utterly uncharacteristic of Noel Cardew as this was typical.
”Which do you like?” he asked her. ”I chose all the most original ones I could see. I always like unconventional designs better than conventional ones, I'm afraid. Where's that long one you showed me this morning?”
”The diamond marquise, sir?” The a.s.sistant deferentially produced it, glancing the while at Alex.
”That's it,” said Noel eagerly. ”Try it on, Alex, won't you?”