"Sit down, Esther," she said, "and let Mr. Blake shake hands with me. No, I can't stay to dinner. Esther may, if she likes, but I've business on my hands. It's with that dirty little man Jeff's got such a prejudice against."
"Not Weedon Moore," conjectured the colonel. "If you've any law business, Madame Beattie, you'd far better go to Alston Choate. Moore's no kind of a man."
"He's the right kind for me," said Madame Beattie. "No manners, no traditions, no scruples. It's a dirty job I've got for him, and it takes a dirty man to do it."
She had risen now, and was smiling placidly up at the colonel. He frowned at her, involuntarily. He was ready to accept Madame Beattie's knowing neither good nor evil, but she seemed to him singularly unpleasant in flaunting that lack of bias. She was quite conscious of his distaste, but it didn't trouble her. Unproductive opinions were nothing to her now, especially in Addington.
"You're not going, too," said the colonel, as Esther rose and followed her. "I hoped—" But what he hoped he kept himself from saying.
"I must," said Esther, with a little deprecatory look and another significant one at Madame Beattie's back. "Good-bye."
She threw Lydia, in her scornful silence there in the background, a smile and nod.
"But—" the colonel began. Again he had to stop. How could he ask her to come again when he was in the dark about her reason for coming at all?
"I have to go," she said. "I really have to, this time."
Meantime Jeff, handing Madame Beattie into the carriage, had had his word with her.