"How is Mr. Aked to-night? Your servant told our servant that he was ill, and I felt anxious."
"Oh!" Adeline exclaimed, discomposed for a moment, as it seemed to Richard; then she went on coldly, "Uncle is about the same, thank you," and almost immediately closed the door.
"A person to inquire about uncle," she said to Richard, with a peculiar intonation, on re-entering the room. Then, just as he was saying that he must go, there was a knock on the ceiling and she flew away again. Richard waited in the passage till she came downstairs.
"It's nothing. I thought he was dying! Oh!" and she began to cry freely and openly, without attempting to wipe her eyes.
Richard gazed hard at the apron string loosely encircling her waist; from that white line her trembling bust rose like a bud from its calyx, and below it the black dress flowed over her broad hips in gathered folds; he had never seen a figure so exquisite, and the beauty of it took a keener poignancy from their solitude in the still, anxious night—the nurse and the sick man were in another sphere.
"Hadn't you better go to bed?" he said. "You must be tired out and over-excited." How awkward and conventional the words sounded!
CHAPTER XV
In Adeline's idiosyncrasy there was a subtle, elusive suggestion of singularity, of unexpectedness, which Richard in spite of himself found very alluring, and he correctly attributed it, in some degree, to the peculiar circumstances of her early life, an account of which, with characteristic quaintness, she had given him at their second meeting.