“No, the better thing to do is to act and not talk. Put on your hat, and let us go down to the shops and see if there is anything decent we can buy. A fortnight! I rather liked Percy Levant on the whole, but now I feel as if I hated him. I wish to Heaven, Spenser Churchill had not sent him with us!”
Apparently the Pescia drapers had something decent on sale, for her ladyship made purchases so extensive as to alarm Doris, who, when she remonstrated, was told to mind her own business; and the next two or three days were occupied in consultation with dressmakers and milliners; and Lady Despard had quite forgotten the Marquis of Stoyle and his promised visit.
But Doris had not. And often as she sat, surrounded by “materials” and bonnet shapes, she thought of the strange meeting with the man who had stepped in between her and Lord Cecil, and robbed her of her lover.
How surprised he would have been if she had said:
“Yes, I know, my lord. You are the man who has wrecked my whole life, and broken my heart!”
And yet that was what he had done; for in losing Cecil Neville she had lost all that makes life worth living.
Was there a single night in which, in feverish dreams, she did not hear his voice, and feel his passionate kisses on her lips? Was there a single morning on which she did not wake with that dull aching of the heart which some of us know so well! And she was to marry another man in a fortnight!
During these two days Percy Levant was absent. He, too, had to make preparations for the approaching wedding, and, strange to say, Doris missed him. He had been so like her shadow for months past, always near her and ready, and promptly ready, to forestall her lightest wish, that his absence made itself felt.
On the third day Lady Despard and she were sitting in the former’s boudoir, literally up to their knees in millinery, when a footman brought in a card.
“Can’t see any one this afternoon,” said Lady Despard. “Unless they understand and can undertake plain sewing. Who is it, dear?”