"I must keep you up for a quarter of an hour while I tell you something. But first of all, how do you like the people? Will you be able to be comfortable with them?" Alice of course said that she thought she would; and then there came that little discussion in which the duties of Mr. Bott, the man with the red hair, were described.
"But I've got something to tell you," said Lady Glencora, when they had already been there some twenty minutes. "Sit down opposite to me, and look at the fire while I look at you."
"Is it anything terrible?"
"It's nothing wrong."
"Oh, Lady Glencora, if it's—"
"I won't have you call me Lady Glencora. Don't I call you Alice? Why are you so unkind to me? I have not come to you now asking you to do for me anything that you ought not to do."
"But you are going to tell me something." Alice felt sure that the thing to be told would have some reference to Mr. Fitzgerald, and she did not wish to hear Mr. Fitzgerald's name from her cousin's lips.
"Tell you something;—of course I am. I'm going to tell you that,—that in writing to you the other day I wrote a fib. But it wasn't that I wished to deceive you;—only I couldn't say it all in a letter."
"Say all what?"
"You know I confessed that I had been very bad in not coming to you in London last year."