"You shall hear from me again," growled Sir Jasper, murderously—"Toombs," cried he to the butler with a snarl, "show the Bishop the door!"
The Bishop smiled. He wheeled upon them all a stately back, and with short deliberate steps withdrew, taking his cane from the footman with a glassy look that petrified Thomas, and refusing Mr. Toombs' proffered ministrations as he might have waved aside a cup of poison. "Vade retro Satanas," he seemed to say; and so departed, leaving his pastoral curse voicelessly behind him.
SCENE XII
"How beautiful you are!" said Lord Verney.
He was sitting on a stool at Mrs. Bellairs' feet. She had abandoned to him one plump taper-fingered hand. The gay little parlour of the Queen Square house was full of sunshine and of the screeching ecstasy of Mistress Kitty's canary bird.
"How beautiful you are!" said he; it was for the fourth time within the half-hour. Conversation between them had languished somehow.
Kitty Bellairs flung a sidelong wistful look upon her lover's countenance. His eyes, gazing upwards upon her, devoured her beauty with the self-same expression that she had found so entrancing earlier in the day. "Deep wells of passion," she had told herself then. Now a chill shade of misgiving crept upon her.
"His eyes are like a calf's," she said to herself suddenly.
*****