“What else?” his wife answered. “It was obvious that she was interested in him when he was staying here, and twice since I have met them walking together. I hate mysterious people. They tell me that he has made Blackbird’s Nest look like a museum inside, and there is the most awful old woman, with white hair and black eyes, who never leaves his side, they say, when he is at home.”
“She is,” Rochester remarked, “I presume, of an age to disarm scandal?”
“She looks as old as Methuselah,” his wife answered, “but what does the man want with such a creature at all?”
“She may be an elderly relative,” Rochester suggested.
“Relative? Why, she calls herself the Comtesse somebody!” Lady Mary declared. “I do wish you would tell me, Henry, exactly what you know and what you do not know about this young man.”
“What I do know is simple enough,” he answered. “What I do not know would, I begin to believe, fill a volume.”
“Then you had better go and see him, and readjust matters,” she declared, a little sharply. “I want Lois to marry well, and she mustn’t have her head turned by this young man.”
Rochester strolled through the open French-window into the flower-garden. He pulled a low basket chair out into the sun, close to a bed of pink and white hyacinths. A man-servant, seeing him, brought out the morning papers, which had just arrived, but Rochester waved them away.
“Fancy reading the newspapers on a morning like this!” he murmured, half to himself. “The person who would welcome the intrusion of a world of vulgar facts into an æsthetically perfect half-hour, deserves—well, deserves to be the sort of person he must be. Take the papers away, Groves,” he added, as the man stood by, a little embarrassed. “Take them to Lord Penarvon or Mr. Hinckley.”