Mrs. Hardy was perfectly satisfied with the result of her diplomatic measures. Rachel sat by her aunt's side, and sewed industriously all the evening at a pinafore for her precious baby, who was about to be short-coated. Mr. Dalrymple sat rather apart, gnawing his moustache, apparently absorbed in a photographic album of Lucilla's, which he had discovered in a cabinet near him.
Two or three times, when Rachel stole a look across the room, unable to repress her restless curiosity to know what he was doing, she saw him gazing meditatively at this open book, and always on the first page of it. She wondered whose photographs they were that interested him so much, and she felt that she could not go to bed without satisfying her anxiety on this point.
When after tea, music and cards and other gentle entertainments were set going, and Mr. Dalrymple was at last enticed by his host from his corner and his album to make a fourth at the whist-table, she watched her opportunity and stole round to the chair on which he had been sitting. He had his back to her, but he was facing a mirror in which he could see her distinctly; and while he watched her movements, he trumped his partner's trick for the first time in his life, and otherwise disgraced a notorious reputation.
"I suppose," said Mrs. Hale, who was his partner, with considerable asperity, "that you don't trouble to play well if you haven't some great stake to play for."
"I beg your pardon," he replied, gravely bending his head. Rachel was stealing back to her aunt's side and her baby's pinafore, and he left off looking into the mirror and making mistakes.
Meanwhile Rachel had satisfied her curiosity. When she opened the album on the first page she saw two familiar faces—one of a young, bright girl, with pensive eyes, conspicuous for "that royalty which subjects kings;" the other angular, aquiline, hollow, full of the lines of age, and smirking with the sprightliness of youth—herself and Mr. Kingston, to whom, unknown to her, Lucilia had lately given this place of honour.
She stood still for a few minutes, looking down on them, with the colour deepening in her cheeks. She seemed to see for the first time how incongruous a pair they made, and how mean a presence her lover really bore.
It was a bad likeness of him, she said to herself; but in point of fact she was shocked by a faithful representation of his meagre features and his peculiar smile—which after all was too frivolous and artificial to be worthy of comparison with the smile of Mephistopheles.
She did not consciously judge his by the standard of that other face, which was so impressively dignified and resolute; but she had looked at this same photograph two days ago, and then it had not struck her unpleasantly, as it did now.
Without thinking what she was doing, she tore out her own likeness, and also the last photograph in the book, which was an old one of her Cousin Lucilla as a child, and she made them change places. Having effected which—surreptitiously, as she thought—she closed the album softly, laid it away in the cabinet, and returned to her seat by her aunt's side.