Was it that she was really grown more handy, or was it that with this gentle aunt she was quite at her ease, yet too much subdued to be careless and rough?
The luncheon came; and after it, she drove with her aunt first to a few shops, and then to take up the Colonel, who had been with his lawyer. Kate quaked a little inwardly, lest it should be about the Lord Chancellor, and tried to frame a question on the subject to her aunt; but even the most chattering little girls know what it is to have their lips sealed by an odd sort of reserve upon the very matters that make them most uneasy; and just because her wild imagination had been thinking that perhaps this was all a plot to waylay her into the Lord Chancellor’s clutches, she could not utter a word on the matter, while they drove through the quiet squares where lawyers live.
Mrs. Umfraville, however, soon put that out of her head by talking to her about the Wardours, and setting open the flood gates of her eloquence about Sylvia. So delightful was it to have a listener, that Kate did not grow impatient, long as they waited at the lawyer’s door in the dull square, and indeed was sorry when the Colonel made his appearance. He just said to her that he hoped she was not tired of waiting; and as she replied with a frightened little “No, thank you,” began telling his wife something that Kate soon perceived belonged to his own concerns, not to hers; so she left off trying to gather the meaning in the rumble of the wheels, and looked out of window, for she could never be quite at ease when she felt that those eyes might be upon her.
On coming back to the hotel, Mrs. Umfraville found a note on the table for her: she read it, gave it to her husband, and said, “I had better go directly.”
“Will it not be too much? Can you?” he said very low; and there was the same repressed twitching of the muscles of his face, as Kate had seen when he was left with his sister Jane.
“Oh yes!” she said fervently; “I shall like it. And it is her only chance; you see she goes to-morrow.”
The carriage was ordered again, and Mrs. Umfraville explained to Kate that the note was from a poor invalid lady whose son was in their own regiment in India, that she was longing to hear about him, and was going out of town the next day.
“And what shall I give you to amuse yourself with, my dear?” asked Mrs. Umfraville. “I am afraid we have hardly a book that will suit you.”
Kate had a great mind to ask to go and sit in the carriage, rather than remain alone with the terrible black moustache; but she was afraid of the Colonel’s mentioning Aunt Barbara’s orders that she was not to be let out of sight. “If you please,” she said, “if I might write to Sylvia.”
Her aunt kindly established her at a little table, with a leathern writing-case, and her uncle mended a pen for her. Then her aunt went away, and he sat down to his own letters.