“Oh!” cried Miss Maitland, bursting into the room at the nick of time, yet feigning amazement.
Fanny heard the ejaculations, and whipped away from Harrington into the window. Zoe, with no motive but her own coyness, had already snatched her hand away from Severne.
But both young ladies were one moment too late. The eagle eye of a terrible old maid had embraced the entire situation, and they saw it had.
Harrington Vizard, Esq., smoked on, with his back to the group. But the rest were a picture—the mutinous face and keen eyes of Fanny Dover, bristling with defense, at the window; Zoe blushing crimson, and newly started away from her too-enterprising wooer; and the tall, thin, grim old maid, standing stiff, as sentinel, at the bedroom door, and gimleting both her charges alternately with steel-gray orbs; she seemed like an owl, all eyes and beak.
When the chaperon had fixed the situation thoroughly, she stalked erect into the room, and said, very expressively, “I am afraid I disturb you.”
Zoe, from crimson, blushed scarlet, and hung her head; but Fanny was ready.
“La! aunt,” said she, ironically, and with pertness infinite, “you know you are always welcome. Where ever have you been all this time? We were afraid we had lost you.”
Aunt fired her pistol in reply: “I was not far off—most fortunately.”
Zoe, finding that, even under crushing circumstances, Fanny had fight in her, glided instantly to her side, and Aunt Maitland opened battle all round.
“May I ask, sir,” said she to Severne, with a horrible smile, “what you were doing when I came in?”