"Ah! that is just it," says Lilian, consumed with a desire to tell: she sinks her voice mysteriously, and sighs a heavy sigh tinctured with melancholy.
"Just so," unsympathetically. "Some women, I believe, are hopeless idiots."
"They are not," indignantly; "Cecilia is not an idiot; she is miserable because he is—alive! Now what do you think?"
"Alive!" incredulously.
"Exactly so," with all the air of a triumphant raconteur. "And when she had believed him dead, too, for so long! is it not hard upon her, poor thing! to have him come to life again so disagreeably without a word of warning? I really think it is quite enough to kill her."
"Well, I never!" says Mr. Chesney, staring at her. It isn't an elegant remark, but it is full of animated surprise, and satisfies Lilian.
"Is it not a tragedy?" she says, growing more and more pitiful every moment. "All was going on well (it doesn't matter what), when suddenly some one wrote to Colonel Trant to say he had seen this odious Mr. Arlington alive and well in Russia, and that he was on his way home. I shall always"—viciously—"hate the man who wrote it: one would think he had nothing else to write about, stupid creature! but is it not shocking for her, poor thing?"
At this, seemingly without rhyme or reason (except a depraved delight in other people's sufferings), Mr. Chesney bursts into a loud enjoyable laugh, and continues it for some seconds. He might perhaps have continued it until now, did not Lilian see fit to wither his mirth in the bud.
"Is it a cause for laughter?" she asks, wrathfully; "but it is just like you! I don't believe you have an atom of feeling. Positively I think you would laugh if auntie, who is almost a mother to you, was dead!"
"No, I should not," declares Archibald, subsiding from amusement to the very lowest depths of sulk: "pardon me for contradicting you, but I should not even smile were Lady Chetwoode dead. She is perhaps the one woman in the world whose death would cause me unutterable sorrow."