‘Ah, that lies in the future,’ says she. She rises languidly from the chair into which she has sunk, and smiles at him. ‘I am afraid I am keeping you from your other guests.’
‘Not at all—not at all,’ says Crosby amiably. ‘You are keeping me only from my man and my tie, and the rest of it.’
He bows himself hurriedly, but amiably, out of the room.
CHAPTER XLIV.
‘Where jealousie is the jailour, many break the prison, it opening more wayes to wickedness than it stoppeth.’
It is indeed perilously near the dinner-hour! Mrs. Prior, after a few words with Josephine—who had evidently had her dainty ear applied to the keyhole, and who is distinctly sulky—has gone downstairs and into the smaller drawing-room, where she finds a group on the hearthrug gathered round a little, but friendly, autumn fire, discussing all in heaven and earth. They have evidently come down to earth as she enters, because the name of Susan Barry is being wafted to and fro.
‘Oh, she’s lovely—lovely!’ Lady Forster is saying with enthusiasm. ‘Such eyes, and with such a funny expression in them sometimes—sometimes, when she isn’t so dreadfully in earnest, as she generally is. After all, perhaps the earnestness is her charm. She is certainly the very sweetest thing! George’—she turns, looks round her, and, finding Crosby not present, laughs, and makes a little gesture with her hands—‘George will never be able to go back to his niggers.’ In her heart, being devoted to her only brother, she hopes this will be the case.
‘If you don’t take care, she will marry your brother,’ says Miss Prior from her low seat. She is protecting her complexion from the light of the big lamp near her by a fan far bigger than the lamp.
‘Well, why not?’ says Lady Forster, who detests Josephine.
‘A girl like that—a mere nobody—the daughter of an obscure country parson?’