"Oh! I wish I could tell her outright, my dear lady!" she cried to herself. "I almost believe she would sympathise with me, but if I see that she would not, and that it would hurt and anger her, I will give up even this, my ambition."
Gerard Strobridge was not of this party; he had been obliged to go to his brother's, so Katherine would have no collaborator and would be forced to act alone.
She did not dine downstairs, but was required in the drawing-room afterwards, and until ten o'clock she stayed alone in her sitting-room, wondering what the Duke had thought, and if it would have been wiser to have stayed for a minute after firing her bomb.
Had she known it, nothing to chain his interest could have been better than her swift disappearance, for he was now thinking of her, and at the first opportunity between the soup and fish, he said to his hostess:
"Seraphim, I met your secretary, it seems, the other night at Gerard's—a very intelligent girl. I had no idea at the time that she was in any dependent position—and was greatly surprised when she addressed me at the station to-day as 'Your Grace'! She is some misfortunate friend's daughter, I suppose. Anyone I knew?"
Lady Garribardine's eyes beamed with a momentary twinkle which she suppressed—She thought of the auctioneer father and the butcher grandfather and then she said casually:
"No—she came from an advertisement, but she is a splendid creature, with more sense in her little finger than most of us have in our entire bodies—What do you think of my grey locks, Mordryn?"
The Duke assured her he found them bewitching; he saw that she did not mean to speak of her secretary.
"They cause you to look ten years younger, dear friend. I could find it in my heart to make love to you once more—and be repulsed with unabated violence, I fear!"