“Now, Madeline, take me to your room, my dear.”
Madeline rose with an effort.
“Oh, my dearest, you must not go into the draught on any account! I’ll take Lady Rachel to mine.”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Leach; I rather wish to have Miss West to myself for a little, and I dare say she can wrap up if the draughts are so much keener now than at any other time of the day,” and Lady Rachel carried her point.
“I wanted to speak to you alone, Maddie,” she said as she closed the door, “and that odious, thick-skinned, alligator of a woman never gave me a chance! She knows that I loathe her, and might put you on your guard.”
“I am on my guard. I know her, I think, even better than you do.”
“And you don’t like her?”
“No, I don’t trust her.”
“I should hope not. She is a regular sort of society adventuress; a notorious evil-speaker, liar, and slanderer; always poking into secrets, and levying genteel blackmail. I had such an account of her from Mrs. Berthon lately. I never liked her—never; but I was not up to all her history. Her father was a coal merchant, and a man of very low origin—she is a nobody. Major Leach was caught; he thought she had a quantity of money. That is always her bait—display, dress, diamonds. His family no longer speak to her, though she quotes them on all occasions, and gives them as reference to hotels and banks, and lets them in. She owes my dressmaker six hundred pounds, and she has put her off with the excuse that she is going to marry an immensely rich man!”
“Really! who can it be?” indifferently.