"Pray, do you know who I am?"
"No, ma'am," answered Angel.
"Can you guess?" asked the lady sharply.
She shook her head and waited.
"Well then, I'll tell you; I am your grandmother."
"Grandmother," repeated Angel incredulously, and her face grew quite pink. She glanced interrogatively at Philip. Was this lady joking, or was she mad?
"I see you can hardly believe your ears; it does seem ludicrous," said Lady Augusta; "but I was married when I was not much older than herself," she explained to her nephew in an aside, "Well, child, what have you got to say? I suppose you have a tongue?"
Poor Angel, thus adjured, immediately gave utterance to the wrong thing. "Are—you my—mother's mother?" she inquired, and there was a note of keen anxiety in her voice.
"Oh dear, no," rejoined the newly-found relative in a tone of fierce repudiation. "I am your father's mother, Lady Augusta Gascoigne; he was my youngest son. Philip," turning to him, "I must have a talk with you. Get into the carriage, and let me drive you both back to tea."
As this was an offer not to be despised, an opportunity he dare not let slip—for it might be of some benefit to Angel—Captain Gascoigne and his charge accepted the unexpected invitation, and the next minute they were seated in Lady Augusta's landau. Once arrived at Hill Street, she led the way up to her drawing-room, and there discovered her daughter extended on the sofa, engrossed in a book. Eva at once struggled up awkwardly, letting a large piece of coarse knitting roll to the floor. She was a thin, high-shouldered woman, with a mass of coarse red hair and a droop in one of her eyelids, keenly sensitive of her own shortcomings, and much prone to good nature and good works.