Clara rushed out into the garden to tell the stiff old rose-trees that if Lord Ormersfield were savage now, he would be more horrid than ever.
Meanwhile, Louis drew a long sigh, murmuring, 'Have I gone and vexed him again? Mary, have I been very silly?'
The half-piteous doubt and compunction had something childish, which made her smile as she answered: 'You had better have done as you were told.'
'The surest road to silliness,' said Louis, whose tendency was to moralize the more, the more tired he was, 'is to think one is going to do something fine! It is dismal work to come out at the other end of an illusion.'
'With a foot aching as, I am afraid, yours does.'
'I should not mind that, but that I made such horrid mistakes!'
These weighed upon his mind so much, that he went on, half aloud, rehearsing the manoeuvres and orders in which he had failed, from the difficulty of taking the command of his troop for the first time, when bewildered with pain and discomfort. The others came in, and James looked rabid; Louis stole a glance now and then at his father, who preserved a grave silence, while Clara stood aloof, comparing the prostrate figure in blue and silver to all the wounded knights in history or fiction.
He was past going in to dinner, and the party were 'civil and melancholy,' Mrs. Frost casting beseeching looks at her grandson, who sat visibly chafing at the gloom that rested on the Earl's brow, and which increased at each message of refusal of everything but iced water. At last Mrs. Frost carried off some grapes from the dessert to tempt him, and as she passed through the open window—her readiest way to the library—the Earl's thanks concluded with a disconsolate murmur 'quite ill,' and 'abominable folly;' a mere soliloquy and nearly inaudible, but sufficient spark to produce the explosion.
'Fitzjocelyn's motives deserve no such name as folly,' James cried, with stammering eagerness.
'I know you did not encourage him,' said Lord Ormersfield.