[CHAPTER XXIV]
ON THE BALCONY.
"Are you going out this evening, Stewart?" asked Harriet Routh of her husband, as they sat together, after their dinner--which had not been a particularly lively meal--was removed. She did not look at him as she put the question, but gazed out of the window, holding back the curtain, while she spoke. Stewart Routh was examining the contents of a heap of letters which lay on the table before him, and did not answer for a moment. She repeated the question:
"Are you going out anywhere this evening, Stewart?"
"Of course I am going out," he answered impatiently. "Why do you ask? I am not going to be mewed up here in this stifling room all the evening."
"No, of course not," she answered very gently and without an inflection in her voice to betray that she perceived the irritation of his tone. "Of course not. You go out every evening, as every one else does here. I only asked because I think of going with you."
"You, Harry?" he said, with real embarrassment, but with feigned cordiality. "That is a sudden start. Why, you have never been out in the evening since we've been here but once, and then you seemed to dislike the place very much. Have you not been out to-day?"
"Yes, I have. I walked a long way to-day. But I have a fancy to go to the Kursaal this evening. George Dallas tells me a number of new people have come, and I have a fancy to see them."
Stewart Routh frowned. He disliked this fancy of his wife's; he did not understand it. Harriet had always shrunk from strangers and crowds, and had gone to Homburg very unwillingly. On their first arrival, when he would have been tolerably willing to take her about with him, though he felt a growing repugnance to her society, she would not go out except to drink the waters early in the day, and now, on an occasion when it was particularly inconvenient to him, she took a fancy to go out. Besides, he hated the mention of George Dallas's name. There was a tacit sympathy between him and Harriet on this point. True, she bore the pain of his daily visits, but then she was accustomed to bearing pain. But she rarely spoke of him, and she knew his intercourse with Routh was very slight and casual. Harriet possessed even more than the ordinary feminine power of divination in such matters, and she felt instinctively that Mr. Felton both disliked and distrusted her husband.
"It is fortunate we do not want to use Dallas for our purpose any longer," Harriet had said to herself on only the second occasion of her seeing the uncle and nephew together--"very fortunate; for Mr. Felton would be a decided and a dangerous antagonist. Weak and wavering as George is, his uncle could rule him, I am sure, and would do so, contrary to us." This impression had been confirmed since Harriet had watched, as she was in the habit of doing, the proceedings of Mr. Felton and George at Homburg. When George visited her, he rarely mentioned Routh, and she knew they had not dined together ever since they had been there. Assisted, insensibly, by his uncle's opinion and influence, George had emancipated himself, as all his reflections had dictated, but all his resolutions had failed to accomplish. So Harriet ceased to mention George to Routh, and thus it was that her speech jarred unpleasantly upon his ear.