Cressida Read Free

her very dull though very good frock.
    She herself, however, had had eyes for no one but Rossiter. He had asked her to stand up with him at the Assembly, asked her so negligently that she had been stung into a display of indifference quite foreign to her usual half-shy, half-eager manner. Then in the middle of the dance he had said to her abruptly, “What the deuce is the matter with you? If you didn’t care to dance with me, why say you would?”—and they had been off. She had stiffened, had answered him with a frankness as unconventional as his own, and, quite regardless of the niceties of ballroom etiquette—with which, it had to be said in her defence, she had had little opportunity to become acquainted because of the secluded life she had led—had forthwith walked off the floor.
    He had followed her. Within half an hour they had made up their quarrel and were talking to each other as if they had been acquainted all their lives; within four-and-twenty hours she had known she was in love with him; and within a week they were engaged. His regiment had been ordered to Portugal, but she was willing, even eager, to follow the drum with him. Of course great-aunt Estella had had to be informed; she had said little, but that little penetratingly to the point that they were both making utter fools of themselves, and had allowed matters to take their course.
    Which of course they had, to the rapid denouement of one broken engagement and one (only one, Cressida was obliged to believe) temporarily broken heart. If Rossiter’s own heart had suffered even the slightest crack, he had managed to conceal it very well both from her and from the rest of the world after that horrid evening when, as she had told Lady Constance, they had had a blazing quarrel and the engagement had been broken off.
    Looking back at it afterwards, out of the miasma of bitterness and humiliation in which she had lived for the succeeding months, it had seemed to her that Rossiter had deliberately provoked that quarrel, for it had been he, she was sure, who had first suggested that she think twice before committing her future to the uncertainties of the career of an officer in a Line regiment in wartime. They were both, he had pointed out, without expectations—for at that time no one had had the least notion where Great-aunt Estella intended to leave her fortune— and who was to blame her if she had leapt to the conclusion that his insistence upon this point meant that he himself had had second thoughts about the wisdom of marrying a portionless girl?
    She had answered him, she remembered, disdainfully: his own temper was as rough and direct as hers was quick and impetuous, and words had been spoken that it was unlikely either of them would forgive or forget.
    And so he had gone off to Portugal alone, and she, after a few months of a horrid kind of corrosive misery, as if acid had somehow got inside her and were eating away all the happy, eager expectations that, in spite of everything, she had always managed to keep bright there, had awakened one morning to find Great-aunt Estella dead and herself the possessor of a fortune beyond her wildest dreams.
    It had often occurred to her since to wonder what Captain Deverell Rossiter had felt when he had learned that on the day he had broken off his engagement to young Miss Cressida Calverton he had thrown away a magnificent fortune as well. She would have been more than human if the thought of his chagrin had not spread balm over her misery—and more than human, too, if the change in her life brought about by Great-aunt Estella’s death had not done much to erase the memory of that brief engagement from her mind. Lady Constance, a relation by marriage on her mother’s side and a lady well acquainted in the fashionable world, had been hit upon by her uncle Arthur as the proper person to take her new household in charge and introduce her into the ton,  and a