“I’d scorn to amuse myself when I can be helping you,” he would retort. “If it were not for my assistance you would break down under the weight of your duties. Now, when you’ve muddled that bill of fare as much as you want to, hand it over to me and I’ll set it straight for you, and without extra charge. And look here; I wish you’d tell the butler to tell the second footman—I think his name is Grooms—not to spill the melted butter down my coat when he is laughing at my jokes. I’m a poor young man, and have only one dress-coat in the world, and Grooms ought to have more human sympathy. Oh! come on, and let the housekeeper finish that thing; she’ll do it far better than you can. I’ve got the balls and your racket.”
“Why don’t you ask Esmeralda or Ada to play with you?” Lilias would ask.
“Esmeralda has got a headache, and is sitting with the duke in the west arbor, and Lady Ada has gone for a ride with Traff and Selvaine.”
“And so you come to me because there is no one else?” Lilias would say, with affected indignation.
“Exactly—that’s it,” would be the cool response. “So come on.” And in the end he would have his way, and, protesting that he was a nuisance, Lilias would put on her tennis-shoes, which he had in his pocket, and they would go off together, and Esmeralda would hear Lilias’s soft ripple and his clear laugh where she sat beside the duke.
The old man seemed to grow fonder of her every day, and Esmeralda’s affection for him was almost piteous. He was the only person in the Belfayre group who did not think of her money—who had not abetted her marriage to Trafford with mercenary views. They were very much together; he seldom went into the grounds without her, and very often she went to his own sitting-room and read to him. Sometimes they would sit for half an hour without talking, and his grace would glance at her occasionally or take her hand and pat it. If her unhappiness dawned upon his dimmed perceptions, he never spoke of it; but once or twice he had looked at her curiously. His pride in her was extraordinary, and on the morning of the great dinner-party at the Court, he actually asked her what she was going to wear.
Esmeralda laughed softly, then stifled a sigh.
“I don’t know,” she said; “Barker generally settles it. It does not matter. But it is very kind of you to ask, duke.”
They were sitting by the open window of his room. Lilias was with the housekeeper, Norman lounging at the door and “hindering,” as Lilias declared, and Trafford and Ada were walking up and down the terrace. Esmeralda could see them from where she sat. Trafford was pacing slowly, with his head bent and his hands behind him; Ada gliding gracefully by his side, and now and again looking up at him with the expression on her face which always set Esmeralda’s heart beating.
How much longer could she endure the sight of them together?