"My dear girl, you did it for the best."
"That always seems to me such a futile, and altogether ineffectual, consolation," said Luce; "and people never offer it to you unless you have absolutely made a fool of yourself."
"But I think, and everybody thinks with me, that you acted very wisely under the circumstances. He could not expect you to marry a poor man. Good heavens! fancy Luce and poverty! The combination is not to be imagined for a moment! It is not your fault that circumstances are altered, and that if you had only waited——"
Lady Luce made a little impatient movement with her hand.
"If I had only waited!" she said, with a mixture of irritation and regret. "It was just my luck that I should meet him when I did."
There was a pause. It need scarcely be said that Nell was extremely uncomfortable. These two were discussing a matter of the most private character, and she was playing the unwelcome part of listener. Had she been a woman of the world, it would have been easy for her to have emerged from her hiding place, and to have swept past them slowly, as if she had seen and heard nothing, as if she were quite unconscious of their presence. But Nell was not a woman of the world; she was just Nell of Shorne Mills, a girl at her first ball, and her first introduction to society. She could not move—could only long for them to become either silent or to go away and leave her free to escape.
"I suppose he was very much cut up?" remarked Lady Chesney.
"That goes without saying," replied Luce. "Of course. He was very fond of me; or, why should he have asked me to marry him? You wouldn't ask the question if you had seen him the day I broke with him. I never saw a man so cut up. It made me quite ill."
"Then the love was not altogether on one side, dear?" said Lady Chesney.
Lady Luce shrugged her white shoulders in eloquent silence.