"Nothing, nothing in the least!" he replied. "You have been good enough to let me talk to you about myself and my hopes and aspirations, Lady Caroline Mansergh. You have probably forgotten"--ah, man, devoid of the merest accidence of worldly grammar!--"you have probably forgotten that this is the morning on which I was to expect my answer from Miss Ashurst. It has come! It is here!" and he stooped forward, picked from the table the letter, and handed it to her.
Lady Caroline seemed rather surprised at this mode of proceeding. She took the letter from Walter's hand, but held it unopened before her, and said--
"You wish me to read it?"
"If you please," he replied. "There is no other way by which you could exactly comprehend the situation, and I wish you to be made aware of it--and--and to advise me in it."
Lady Caroline blushed slightly as she heard these last words, but she said nothing--merely bowed and opened the letter. As she read it, the flush which had died away returned more brightly than before, her eyes could not be seen under their downcast lids, but the brows were knit, the nostrils trembled, and the mouth grew hard and rigid. She read the letter through twice; then she looked up, and her voice shook as she said--
"That is a wicked and base letter, very heartless and very base!"
"Lady Caroline!" interrupted Joyce appealingly.
"What! do you seek to defend it?--no, not to defend it, for in your own heart you must know I am right in my condemnation of it, but to plead for it. You don't like to hear me speak harshly of it--that's so like a man I tell you that it is a heartless and an unwomanly letter! 'Deepens the pain with which she writes,' indeed! 'Deepens the pain!' and what about yours? It is her nature to love money and comforts, and luxuries, and to shrink from privations. Her nature! What was she bred to, this duchess?"
In his misery at hearing Marian thus spoken of, since the blow had fallen upon him he had never been so miserable as then, when she was attacked, and he saw the impossibility of defending her. Joyce could not help remarking that he had never noticed Lady Caroline's beauty so much as at that moment, when her eyes were flashing and her ripe lips curling with contempt. But he was silent, and she proceeded--
"She says you are better without her, and, though of course you doubt it, I am mightily disposed to agree with her! I--Mr. Joyce!" said her ladyship, suddenly softening her tone, "believe me, I feel earnestly and deeply for you under this blow! I fear it is none the less severe because you don't show how much you suffer. This--this young lady's decision will of course materially affect the future which you had plotted out for yourself, and of which we spoke the last time we were here together?"