These somewhat grandiloquent words were music to her ears. Naturally dependent, she was only too thankful to be able to cast her cares on to his shoulders; and now that he had ceased to counsel her to face her tyrants with resolution she began to think that she might like him very well as a husband. At least he was kind, and gentle, and loved her very much; and although he was not her ideal she supposed that they might live very contentedly together.

Her mind relieved of its paramount dread, she was able to listen to the rest of the play with tolerable enjoyment, but she did not recover her vivacity, her attitude being languid and listless enough to make Mrs Floore say, as soon as Mr Goring had escorted them home: “Now, Emma-love, you just tell Grandma what’s the matter, and no nonsense! If you’re looking like a drowned mouse all because your ma is coming to stay with me tomorrow, you’re a goosecap! Now, ain’t you?”

“I—I am afraid Mama means to take me away from you, Grandmama!” faltered Emily.

“Bless your sweet heart!” exclaimed Mrs Floore, planting a smacking kiss upon her cheek. “So you don’t want to leave your grandma! Well, I don’t deny I love to hear you say so, my pet, but there’s reason in all things, and I can’t say that I’m surprised your ma’s got to be a trifle impatient. I’ll be bound she’s got her head full of your bride-clothes by this time—and so will you have before you are very much older! Lord, how I do look forward to reading all about you when you’re a Marchioness! You think about what’s before you, pet, and never mind about your old grandma!”

This bracing speech, excellent in intention though it was, shut the door on confidence. Grandmama, as much as Mama, wished to see Emily a Marchioness. Emily kissed her, and went upstairs to bed, planning her escape on the morrow, praying that it might not be frustrated by the arrival of her betrothed, and wondering where Gerard meant to take her.

20

Serena, arriving in Beaufort Square at eleven o’clock on the following morning, mounted on her good-looking mare, and attended by her groom, was a little surprised not to see a livery horse waiting outside Mrs Floore’s house. Fully alive to the honour of being invited to ride with so noted a horsewoman, Emily had formed the practice, on these occasions, of ordering her hired hack to be brought round quite twenty minutes too soon, and of running out of the house, the instant she saw, from her lookout in the dining-room window, that neat figure rounding the corner of the square.

“You had better knock on the door, Fobbing,” Serena said, holding out her hand for his bridle.

He gave it to her, but before he had reached the front door, it opened, and Mr Goring stepped out. He came up to the mare, and, looking gravely into the beautiful face above him, said: “Lady Serena, Mrs Floore desires me to ask you if you will be so good as to come into the house for a moment.”

Her brows rose swiftly. “I will do so, certainly. Is anything amiss?”

“I am afraid—very much amiss,” he replied, in a heavy tone. He held up his hand. “May I assist you to—”

“No, I thank you.” One deft, practised movement, and her voluminous skirt was clear of the pommels. The next instant she was on the ground, and giving her bridle into Fobbing’s hand. She caught up her skirt, swinging it over her arm, and went with Mr Goring into the house. “Is Emily ill?” she asked.

“No, not ill. It will be better, I daresay, if you learn from Mrs Floore what has occurred. I myself arrived here only a short time ago, and—But I will take you up to Mrs Floore! I should warn you that you will find her in considerable distress, Lady Serena.”

“Good God, what can have happened?” she exclaimed, hurrying towards the stairs, her whip still in her hand.

He followed close on her booted heels, and on the first floor slid in front of her, to open the door into the drawing-room. Serena went in, with her free stride, but checked in astonished dismay at the spectacle that met her eyes. The redoubtable Mrs Floore, still attired in her dressing-gown, was lying back in a deep wing-chair, her housekeeper holding burnt feathers to her nose, and her maid kneeling before her and chafing her hands.

“My dear ma’am—! For heaven’s sake, what dreadful accident has befallen?” Serena demanded.

The housekeeper, shedding tears, sobbed: “It’s her poor heart, my lady! The shock gave her such palpitations as was like to have carried her off! Years ago, the doctor told me she should take care, and now see what’s come of it! Oh, my lady, what a serpent’s tooth she has nourished in her bosom!”

The maid, much moved, began to sob in sympathy. Mrs Floore, whose usually rubicund countenance Serena saw to have assumed an alarmingly grey tinge, opened her eyes, and said faintly: “Oh, my dear! What shall I do? Why didn’t she tell me? Oh, what a silly, blind fool I have been! I thought—What am I to do?”

Serena, casting her whip on to the table, and stripping off her elegant gauntlets, said, in her authoritative way: “You shall remain perfectly quiet, dear ma’am, until you are a little restored. Get up off the floor, woman, and fetch some hartshorn, or a cordial, to your mistress immediately! And take those feathers away, you idiot! Mr Goring, be so good as to help me move her on to the sofa!”

He was very willing, but a little doubtful, and said in a low voice: “I had better call up the butler: she is too heavy for you, ma’am!”

Serena, who had quickly arranged some cushions at the head of the sofa, merely replied briefly: “Take her shoulders, and do not talk nonsense!”

Once disposed at full length on the sofa, Mrs Floore moaned, but soon began to look less grey. She tried to speak, but Serena hushed her, saying: “Presently, ma’am!” When the maid came back, bearing a glass containing a dose of some cordial in her trembling hand, Serena took it from her, and, raising the sufferer’s head, obliged her to swallow it. In a very short space of time the colour began to come back into Mrs Floore’s cheeks, and her breathing became more regular. The housekeeper, bereft of her evil-smelling feathers, waved a vinaigrette about under her nose, and her maid, still much affected, fanned her with a copy of the Morning Post.

Serena moved away to the window, where Mr Goring was standing. “The less she tries to talk the better it will be for her,”she said, in an undertone. “Now, tell me, if you please, what has happened to overset her like this?”

“Emily—Miss Laleham, I should say—has left the house,” he responded, still in that heavy tone. He saw that she was staring at him with knit brows, and added: “She has run away, ma’am. Leaving behind her a letter for her grandmother.”

“Good heavens! Where is it?”

“Give it to her, Ned!” commanded Mrs Floore, struggling to sit up. “Drat you, Stoke, don’t keep pushing me back! Give me those smelling-salts, and go away, do! I don’t need you any more, nor you neither, Betsey, crying all over me! No, don’t you go, Ned! If there’s anything to be done, there’s no one else to do it for me, for I can’t go careering all over the country—not that it would do a mite of good if I could, for who’s to say where she’s gone to? Oh, Emma, why ever didn’t you tell your grandma?”

Mr Goring had picked up a sheet of paper from the table, and had in silence handed it to Serena.

Dearest Grandmama, it began, in Emma’s unformed writing, “I am so very sorry and I do not like to grieve you but I cannot bear it and I cannot marry Lord R. in spite of coronets, because he frightens me, and I did not tell you but he has written me a dreadful letter and is coming here and he and Mama will make me do just what they want, and indeed I cannot bear it, though I hate excessively to leave you without saying goodbye. Pray do not be angry with me, my dear, dearest Grandmama. Your loving Emma. PS. Pray, pray do not tell Mama or Lord R. where I have gone.

“You would certainly be in a puzzle to do so!” said Serena, reaching the postscript. “Of all the bird-witted little idiots—! My dear ma’am, I beg your pardon, but she deserves to be slapped for such folly! What the devil does she mean by writing such stuff? Rotherham write her a “dreadful letter”? What nonsense! If he has grown impatient, it is not to be wondered at, but to write of him as though he were an ogre is quite abominable!”

“But she is afraid of him, Lady Serena,” said Mr Goring.

“I ought to have known it was Sukey’s doing!” said Mrs Floore, in an agony of remorse. “Right at the start, didn’t I suspect it? Only then Emma wrote me such a letter, so happy it seemed to me, that I thought—Poor little lamb, if I’d only had the sense to tell her what I think of Sukey, which I never did, not thinking it seemly, she wouldn’t have been afraid to tell me! And now there’s Sukey coming here this very day, and how to face her I don’t know, for there’s no denying I haven’t taken proper care of Emma. Not that I care a fig for Sukey, and so I shall tell her! And as for this precious Marquis, let him dare show his face here! Let him dare, that’s all I ask! Scaring the dear little soul out of her senses, which nobody can tell me he hasn’t done, because I know better! And last night—Oh, Ned, I thought she was moped because she didn’t want Sukey to take her away from me, and all I did was to tell her to think about her bride-clothes, so I daresay she took it into her head I was as set on this nasty marriage as her ma! And now what am I to do? When I think of my little Emma, running off all alone, to hide herself heaven knows where—”

“You may be certain of one thing at least, ma’am!” interrupted Serena. “She has not run away alone!”