"I think we could perhaps manage that for you," Mrs. Armitage had replied, and she had managed it.
"Is she coming?" Harry said to Mrs. Armitage, in an anxious whisper, as he entered the room.
"She has been here this half-hour,—if you had taken the trouble to leave your cigars and come and meet her."
"She has not gone?" said Harry, almost awe-struck at the idea.
"No; she is sitting like Patience on a monument, smiling at grief, in the room inside. She has got horrible news to tell you."
"Oh, heavens! What news?"
"I suppose she will tell you, though she has not been communicative to me in regard to your royal highness. The news is simply that her mother is going to take her to Brussels, and that she is to live for a while amid the ambassadorial splendors with Sir Magnus and his wife."
By retiring from the world Mrs. Mountjoy had not intended to include such slight social relaxations as Mrs. Armitage's party, for Harry on turning round encountered her talking to another Cheltenham lady. He greeted her with his pleasantest smile, to which Mrs. Mountjoy did not respond quite so sweetly. She had ever greatly feared Harry Annesley, and had to-day heard a story very much, as she thought, to his discredit. "Is your daughter here?" asked Harry, with well-trained hypocrisy. Mrs. Mountjoy could not but acknowledge that Florence was in the room, and then Harry passed on in pursuit of his quarry.
"Oh, Mr. Annesley, when did you come to Cheltenham?"
"As soon as I heard that Mrs. Armitage was going to have a party I began to think of coming immediately." Then an idea for the first time shot through Florence's mind—that her friend Mrs. Armitage was a woman devoted to intrigue. "What dance have you disengaged? I have something that I must tell you to-night. You don't mean to say that you will not give me one dance?" This was merely a lover's anxious doubt on his part, because Florence had not at once replied to him. "I am told that you are going away to Brussels."