'Lady Oxford!' he cried out as if in amazement, since he had bottomed the mystery for now some time. 'Forgive me, madam, if my hasty loyalty to my Sovereign prevented me from recognising his latest adherent. The Cause must now infallibly triumph.'
'Sir,' she began, looking up at him with her eyes melting from anger to reproach, 'your apology is something graceless. For though my colour be gone'--it was only the worse or artificial part of her matchless complexion which the mask had rubbed off--'you yet had time to know and respect a face you--'and then she came suddenly to a stop, as she untied the strings of her domino and threw it back from her shoulders. 'You blame me,' she said pitifully. Her ladyship was a ready woman, and even went more than half-way to meet an attack. At Brampton Bryan the talk had been of duty and the charms of a rustic life; but here the dutiful country wife, violently disarrayed in the extreme of fashion, had been alone to a masquerade ball and Mr. Kelly might conceive himself tricked. And so 'You blame me,' she said, 'you blame me even as you blamed me at Brampton Bryan, and with no more justice.'
'At Brampton Bryan!' exclaimed Kelly suddenly.
'M. de Strasbourg! M. de Strasbourg was Scrope.'
Her ladyship nodded.
'And 'twas he attacked you--would have carried you off.'
Her ladyship shivered.
'And I let him go. Curse me! I let him go even as Nick did. But the third time! Oh, only let the third time come.'
Her ladyship shook her head with the most weariful resignation.
'It will come too late, that third time,' she said; 'too late for me. I have no husband who can protect me, and no friend so kind as to serve me in his place.'