I am not at all sure that my Aunt Kezia would have allowed me to accept it. Some, even among the Tories, thought my Lady Inverness a wicked woman; others reckoned her an injured and a slandered one. I gave her what Father calls “the benefit of the doubt,” thanked her, and accepted the ring. I do not know whether I did right or wrong.
To run down-stairs, say good-bye to Mr Raymond,—by the way, would Mr Raymond have allowed my Lady to enter his house, if he had believed the tales against her?—and hasten back with Ephraim to Bloomsbury Square, took but few minutes. Lucette let us in; I think she had been watching.
“The good Lord has watched over Mademoiselle,” said she, as she took my cloak from me.
Ephraim had gone back to the drawing-room, and I followed. I glanced at the French clock on the mantelpiece, where a gold Cupid in a robe of blue enamel was mowing down an array of hearts with a scythe, and saw that we had been away a little over an hour. Could that be all? How strange it seemed! People were chattering, and flirting fans, and playing cards, as if nothing at all had happened. Miss Newton was sitting where I had left her, talking to Mr Robert Page. Grandmamma sat in her chair, just as usual. Nobody seemed to have missed us, except Hatty, who said with a smile,—“I had lost you, Cary, for the last half-hour.”
“Yes,” said I, “something detained me out of the room.”
I only exchanged one other sentence in the course of the evening with Ephraim:
“You will let me know how things go on? I shall be very anxious.”
“Of course. Yes, I will take care of that.”
And then the company broke up, and I helped Hatty to bed, and prayed from my heart for Colonel Keith and Angus, and did not fall asleep till I had heard Saint Olave’s clock strike two. When I woke, I had been making jumballs in the drawing-room with somebody who was both my Lady Inverness and my Aunt Kezia, and who told me that Colonel Keith had been appointed Governor of the American plantations, and that he would have to be dressed in corduroy.
When I arose in the morning, I could—and willingly would—have thought the whole a dream. But there on my finger, a solid contradiction, was my Lady Inverness’s ring.