Nor was there anything in the discourse that followed to produce in either lady any thoughts suitable to the Sabbath. So apposite to the events of the morning was the sermon that Nell, far from being edified, was hard put to it to stifle a shocking fit of giggles; while Letty, swelling with wrath, could not afterwards be persuaded that Cardross had not suborned the blameless cleric into choosing a text aimed directly at herself.

Upon their return to Grosvenor Square Nell found a note from Dysart awaiting her. No, the porter informed her: his lordship had not called in person, but had sent it by the hand of his groom. Nell bore it upstairs to her dressing-room to peruse it in private, but its contents were disappointing. The Viscount had scrawled no more than a couple of lines to say that he had received her warning, and would take care to keep out of Cardross’s way. He remained her affectionate brother, Dysart. It was only by the exercise of all the resolution at her command that she was able to refrain from dispatching another letter to him then and there, reminding him of the urgency of her need. Lady Sefton called during the course of the afternoon, and stayed for an hour, uttering cryptic remarks, and peeping at Letty through her fingers as she did so in a roguish manner that caused that young lady to apostrophize her later as a nasty creature, which was unjust, since beneath her tiresome affectations she was the kindest of creatures. From having been acquainted with Mrs. Allandale for many years she was pretty well aware of the state of affairs in Grosvenor Square, but even Nell, who liked her, could not acquit her of having come to discover, if she could, any interesting circumstances which had not reached Mrs. Allandale’s ears. Hardly had she departed than a much more unwelcome visitor arrived, in the person of Lady Cowper, who came with the ostensible object of begging dear Lady Cardross to lend her support to a charitable organization of which she herself was a leading patroness, but lost little time in trying to ferret out, in the most caressing way possible, all the details of Letty’s romance. Nell was mortified indeed to realize that her lord’s little sister had become one of the on-dits of London, and, glancing toward her, thought that she too looked to be rather struck. Lady Cowper, like all the Lambs, was possessed of a degree of charm that too often lured the unwary into reposing confidences in her which would later provide her with matter for her witty tongue; but her insinuating manners won her nothing from the two Merion ladies but a stoney stare from Letty, and from Nell a gentle civility that rebuffed all hints and enquiries, and caused her later to tell her numerous acquaintances that it was a sad pity that so beautiful a creature should be so insufferably insipid. As for her hostesses, no sooner had she taken herself off than they spent an agreeable half-hour abusing her, and in trying to decide whether her worst fault was cutting at people behind their backs, or paying visits in dresses trimmed with positively dirty lace.

The evening was enlivened by a spirited attempt made by Letty to convince her brother that in withholding her fortune from her he was guilty of embezzlement. He refused to be drawn into altercation, and even listened to her with great patience when, abandoning this unpromising line of attack, she expatiated on the manifold, if somewhat nebulous, advantages of life in Brazil, and the miseries she would undergo if separated by thousands of miles and an aeon of time from Mr. Allandale. He even tried to coax her into viewing her circumstances with rather more moderation, representing to her in a little amusement, but with a good deal of kindness, that two, or even three, years could hardly be thought an aeon of time; and that the possibility of Mr. Allandale’s being snatched into marriage by a designing female of Portuguese extraction was too remote to be worthy of consideration. “Don’t put yourself in this passion, my dear little sister!” he said, taking her hand, and giving it a squeeze. “You might be so very much worse off, you know! If I were the unfeeling tyrant you believe me to be, I should have told Allandale never to think of you again—and that is certainly what the world will say I should have done! I haven’t said it, and I shall not. But you must not expect me to allow you, at seventeen, to throw yourself away on a young man who has neither birth nor position, and stands as yet only on the threshold of his career. I shan’t do it, so stop coming to cuffs with me, like a good girl, and try to be a little wiser!”

She stared bleakly up into his face, her own very set. “You wouldn’t talk so if you had ever loved anyone as I love Jeremy. You cannot know what it is to form a lasting passion!”

He dropped her hand. “You are mistaken,” he said, in an even tone, and turned away from her to address some light commonplace to his wife.

Letty flushed vividly, and said: “I am not mistaken! You may think you have a heart, but you haven’t! You don’t like to be told that, but it’s true!”

He said, over his shoulder: “Letty, you are not only becoming a dead bore, but you want manner as well as sense! Let me tell you that until you learn to behave with propriety you will make the worst wife imaginable for a diplomat!”

“Jeremy,” said Letty, her bosom heaving, “thinks me perfect!”

“Which,” remarked Cardross, as she slammed herself out of the room, “gives me no very high idea of his understanding.”

Nell smiled, but said only, as she rose from her chair: “I think I should follow her. She has been very low and oppressed all day, and you know how it is with her! When she is happy I never knew anyone whose spirits mounted so high, but they can be all dashed down in a minute, and then she knocks herself up with one of her fits of crying.”

“I have very little patience to waste on such distempered freaks,” he replied. “The truth is that she had been spoilt to death, and cannot endure to have her will crossed!”

“Oh, yes!” she agreed. “But you would not wish her to cry herself into a fever.”

“Nonsense!” he said irritably, adding, however, after a frowning moment: “I don’t wish her to wear your spirits down, at all events! I suppose she will make us endure weeks of sulks. There’s no doing anything until Allandale has sailed, but how would it be if I took a house in Brighton, after all, instead of going home to Merion at the end of the season? Do you remember how cross she was when I refused to take her there? I had nothing but scowls from her for a full week! Well! Prinney’s parties are not what I would choose for her, but if it would divert her to go there—?”

“Perhaps it would divert her a little,” she answered. She raised her eyes, and added, after a moment’s hesitation: “Not very much, however. I don’t mean to vex you, Cardross, but I think you don’t perfectly understand. You hope that Letty will forget Mr. Allandale, but she won’t. You see, she loves him!”

“A child of her age! What does she know of the matter?” She coloured faintly, and managed to say, though not easily: “I was not very much older—when you offered for me.”

His eyes turned towards her, an arrested expression in them. He did not answer her immediately, and when he did speak it was with a certain deliberation. “No. You were not, were you?” he said.

Chapter Ten

The following day was one of gloom, relieved only at nightfall, when the guests began to arrive for a loo-party. It began inauspiciously, with a further reminder from Madame Lavalle, which threw Nell into such a fever of apprehension that she could no longer forbear to plague Dysart, but sent round a letter to his lodgings immediately, imploring him either to tell her what she must do, or to negotiate a loan for her “with a respectable usurer”. Hardly had this been dispatched than Martha came to her with a message from her mistress. Letty, it appeared, had awakened with a toothache, after a troubled night, and begged to be excused from accompanying her sister to North Audley Street, on a morning visit to the Misses Berry.

Nell found the sufferer still abed, a trifle heavy-eyed, but looking remarkably pretty, and without the vestige of a swollen jaw. This seemed to indicate that at least there was no abscess; but when Letty announced in the voice of one dwindling to decay that she thought perhaps the pain would go off if she remained quietly in bed, Nell was resolute in insisting that she should visit the dentist. She was not surprised by Letty’s reluctance to do so, for the prospect of having a tooth drawn was not one which she herself could have faced with equanimity; but when Letty said at last that she would go, and that Martha should accompany her, so that Nell need not postpone her duty-call in North Audley Street, she began to suspect that the toothache was not unconnected with this call. The late Lady Cardross had been a close friend of both the Berry sisters, but her daughter, ungrateful for the kindly interest they took in her, could be depended on to find ingenious excuses for not visiting them. She said that Miss Berry was quizzy, and Miss Agnes cross, and nothing bored her more than to be obliged to drive down to Little Strawberry to spend the day with them. Indeed, she had brightened so perceptibly when Miss Berry, on the occasion of her last visit to the Merion ladies, had confided, with a sigh, that she was compelled to find a tenant for Little Strawberry, that Nell had been positively ashamed of her, and had later taken her severely to task for heartlessness and incivility. So she now eyed the spoiled beauty measuringly, and said that she would herself take her to visit Mr. Tilton. Had she been feeling less oppressed she must have laughed at the smouldering look of resentment cast at her from beneath Letty’s curling eyelashes.