The marchioness made a painful effort to smile.
“I am not at all sure that I shall allow you to speak to Miss Yorke,” she responded, trying to look past him at Belle herself.
On Hammond’s entrance Belle had shrunk back with a certain apprehension which had afforded secret satisfaction to her hostess. She now waited in silence, nervously plucking at the leaves of a camellia which brushed her shoulder where she sat.
“Now she is under my roof,” pursued the marchioness, “I feel in the position of her guardian. I regard you as a very dangerous character.”
A smile of bitter irony gleamed for a moment on Hammond’s lips.
“I rather think you must be right. I don’t know why it is, but I am feeling in a peculiarly lawless mood this evening. If Miss Yorke were not here, I am not at all sure that your diamonds would be safe.”
Something in the manner of this speech, rather than in the words, caused the marchioness to move several inches farther off along the settee. It was a distinct shock to her to hear the Severn diamonds made the subject of coarse jocularity. The one in the centre of her bosom had been given to the first Mauleverer by King John as a reward for resisting the agitation for Magna Charta. Those in the tiara above her forehead had been brought into the family by a left-handed daughter of John of Gaunt. The value of the whole was nearly a year’s income of the much-mortgaged Severn estates.
“Really, Mr. Hammond, you speak so strangely that if I didn’t know you so well I should think something was the matter with you.”
It was necessary to let her ladyship see clearly that she was out of place. Hammond cast on her a look which she had not seen in his eyes before.
“Do you know me well? Does any of us know another well? Don’t we, most of us, drift through life with our eyes half closed, ignorant of our aims, ignorant of our very natures, till some shock comes to awaken us, and in the moment of trial we find out for the first time who and what we really are?”