"Yes," she said, more sternly than before. "I think it is you who do not know what you are saying. You cannot mean to insult me. I beg your pardon, Joseph. I do not mean to be angry, to hurt your feelings. I think you mean to pay me a great honour; and I—I thank you; but I cannot accept it. And please take this as my final answer, and never, never, speak to me again in this manner."
"Do you mean to say—" he began angrily.
"Not another word, please," said Ida, and she hurried forward so that they came within hearing of Isabel.
Nothing more was said until they reached Laburnum Villa. Mrs. Heron was waiting up for them, and was expressing a hope that they had enjoyed themselves—she had a woollen shawl round her shoulders and spoke in an injured voice and with the expression of a long-suffering martyr—when she caught sight of Joseph's angry and sullen face as he flung himself into a chair and thrust his hands in his pockets, and she stopped short and looked from him to Ida, and sniffed suspiciously and aggressively.
"Oh, yes," said Joseph, with an ugly sneer and a scowl at Ida as she was leaving the room, "we have had a very happy time—some of us—a particularly happy time, I don't think!"
CHAPTER XXX.
It was hot at Woodgreen; but it was hotter still in Mayfair, where the season was drawing to a close with all the signs of a long-spun-out and exhausting dissolution. Women were waxing pale under the prolonged strain of entertainments which for the last week or two had been matters of duty rather than pleasure, and many a girl who had entered the lists of society a blushing and hopeful débutante with perhaps a ducal coronet in her mind's eye, was beginning to think that she would have to be content with, say, the simpler one of a viscountess; or even to wed with no coronet at all. Many of the men were down at Cowes or golfing at St. Andrews; and those unfortunates who were detained in attendance at the house which continued to sit, like a "broody hen," as Howard said, longed and sighed for the coming of the magic 12th of August, before which date they assured themselves the House must rise and so bring about their long-delayed holiday.
But one man showed no sign of weariness or a desire for rest; Sir Stephen's step was light and buoyant as ever on the hot pavement of Pall Mall, and on the still hotter one of the city; his face was as cheery, his manner as gay, and his voice as bright and free from care as those of a young man.
There is no elixir like success; and Sir Stephen was drinking deeply of the delicious draught. He had been well known for years: he was famous now. You could not open a newspaper without coming upon his name in the city article, and in the fashionable intelligence. Now it was a report of the meeting of some great company, at which Sir Stephen had presided, at another time it occurred in a graphic account of a big party at the house he had rented at Grosvenor Square. It was a huge mansion, and the rent ran into many figures; but, as Howard remarked, it did not matter; Sir Stephen was rich enough to rent every house in the square. Sir Stephen had taken over the army of servants and lived in a state which was little short of princely: and lived alone; for Stafford, who was not fond of a big house and still less fond of a large retinue, begged permission to remain at his own by no means over-luxurious but rather modest rooms.
It is not improbable that he would have liked to have absented himself from the grand and lavish entertainments with which his father celebrated the success of his latest enterprise; but it was not possible, and Stafford was present at the dinners and luncheons, receptions and concerts which went on, apparently without a break, at Clarendon House.