Judith knelt down by the fire smiling, and took her part with spirit in the girlish jokes and gossip.
It was six o’clock before Adelaide rose to go, by which time the attack of indigestion had set in. Her vivacity died out suddenly; her features looked thick, strained, and lifeless; her sallow skin took a positively orange tinge.
“Dear me,” she cried ill-temperedly, “I had no idea it was so late. I must fly. I have one or two people dining with me to-night: the Cardozos, the Hanbury-ffrenches—oh, and Reuben finds he can come.”
Judith felt suddenly as though a chill wind had struck her; but she called out gaily to Rose, who was escorting Adelaide to the door, that there was time before dinner to practise the new duet.
CHAPTER VII.
On this day shall He make an atonement for you, to purify you; you shall be clean from all your sins. Leviticus xvi. 30.
Herbert, or, as he was generally spoken of, Bertie Lee-Harrison, called at Lancaster Gate on the day of the New Year, to make acquaintance with Reuben’s people and offer his best wishes for the year 564-.
He was a small, fair, fluent person, very carefully dressed, assiduously polite, and bearing on his amiable, commonplace, neatly modelled little face no traces of the spiritual conflict which any one knowing his history might have supposed him to have passed through.
Esther, who happened to be calling on her aunt at the time of Bertie’s visit, classified him at once as an intelligent fool; but Adelaide professed herself delighted with the little man, and had had the joy of informing him that she had once met his sister, Lady Kemys, at a garden-party.
“Lady Kemys is charming,” Reuben said when the matter was being discussed. “Sir Nicholas, too, is a good fellow. They have a place some miles out of St. Baldwin’s.”