The White Virgin

CHAPTER ONE.

BY A THREAD.

It was a long, thin, white finger, one which had felt the throbbing of
hundreds and thousands of pulses, and Doctor Praed, after viciously
flicking at a fly which tried persistently to settle upon his
ivory-white, shiny, bald head, hooked that finger into Clive Reed's
button-hole, just below the white rosebud Janet had given him a little
earlier in the evening.

"Mind the flower."

"All right, puppy. Come here. I want to talk to you."

"About Janet?"

"Pish! mawkish youth. Great ugly fellow like you thinking of nothing
else but Janet. Wait till you've been her slave as I have for eighteen
years."

"Pleasant slavery, Doctor," said the young man, smiling, as he allowed
himself to be led out on to the verandah just over the gas-lamp which
helped to light up Great Guildford Street, W.C.

"Is it, sir? You don't know what a jealous little she-tartar she is."

"I warn you I shall tell her every word you say, Doctor. But it's of no
good. I shall not back out. Look at her dear face now."

Reed caught the little Doctor by the shoulder, and pointed to where his
daughter sat with the light of one of the shaded lamps falling upon her
pretty, animated face, as she laughed at something a sharp-looking,
handsome young man was saying--an anecdote of some kind which amused the
rest of the group in old Grantham Reed's drawing-room.

"Oh yes, she's pretty enough," said the Doctor testily. "I wish she
weren't. Don't let that brother of yours be quite so civil to her, boy.
I don't like Jessop."

"Nor me?" said the young man, smiling.