'Exactly; but don't think,' said Eardley, touching him on the shoulder. 'You have finished your breakfast; come down with me to Dossetor's, and help me to form an opinion on the blue china. After that we will go down to Richmond, stroll about the park, and have a dinner at some quiet place where we shall not have to watch the melancholy amusement of professedly festive people.'
'Agreed, so far as Richmond, the stroll, and the dinner are concerned; but I cannot come with you now, I will meet you there. My head aches a little, and would ache worse if I had to listen to Dossetor's disquisitions on his china; so I will go and get rid of my trouble by a canter in the Row.'
'That will be better perhaps,' said Eardley, 'not only for yourself, but for my china, as it is the one thing in which I require that the opinions of people I consult should coincide with my own, and you seem to me to be rather contradictory this morning. I suppose you will drive me down? Then I will be waiting for you at the club at four.'
'I shall be there to the minute,' said Uffington.
And then Eardley, with an 'Au revoir!' took his hat and strolled leisurely away.
Sir Nugent Uffington was rather more lively and alert after his friend's departure than he had been in the early morning. He paced up and down the room, revolving in his mind whether the affection of Eleanor Irvine for Lady Forestfield was such as would naturally be felt by her for any other person in so desolate and unfortunate a position, or whether it was the outcome of some special interest which Lady Forestfield had awakened in her--if so, what were the sources of that interest? She must be a peculiar woman, Nugent thought, to arouse a feeling which, in the fact that it caused Miss Irvine to act in opposition to the expressed wish of one on whom she was dependent, as Eardley had hinted, must approach devotion. Lady Forestfield must have a powerful will of her own to obtain ascendency over a mind like Eleanor's.
Altogether, Sir Nugent Uffington, who for so many years had been almost emotionless, was beginning to take a certain amount of interest in the affairs which were passing round him, and the centre of that interest, so far as he could judge, was Lady Forestfield.
The ordinary frequenters of the Row, to whom Sir Nugent Uffington had become a familiar figure, and who were not disposed to regard him as a lively or agreeable companion, had no occasion to alter their opinion of him from his behaviour on this particular day. The few who noticed him mentioned him to each other as 'mooning about as usual;' he nodded to very few, and only stopped once, and that was to speak to his old friend Tom Lydyeard, who was leaning over the rails. Their conversation was common-place and matter-of-fact enough, the usual platitudes of society talk--for Tom Lydyeard, a really good-natured fellow, was not much gifted with brains, and even in what he had to say was a trifle rococo and old-worldly--when a sudden impetus was given to it by Lydyeard saying, 'Look at this man on the bright bay, riding outside of the girl with the chestnut; that is the man that everybody is talking of just now--I pointed him out to you the first night we met at the Opera--Lord Forestfield.'
Uffington looked quickly round. At that moment the bay horse shied at a dog which darted from under the railings, and its rider, turning white with rage, brought his riding-stick down with all his force between its ears. The horse bucked and lashed out, but its rider never moved in his seat, and the next moment the little cavalcade had broken into a gallop and were out of sight.
'Nice lot, isn't he?' muttered Tom Lydyeard between his teeth; 'they say he treated his wife that way, and yet they tell me that now there is not a soul in the place, man or woman, to speak a kind word to her, or to do her a good turn. Queer world, ain't it, Uffington?'