Charles flushed slightly, then he frowned.
"It has nothing to do with myself. I have some news she should hear.
Perhaps you yourself——"
She interrupted him with a little mirthless laugh.
"I will not hear anything serious, and you look to me very serious. I am old enough to have promised never again to be serious in my life."
She submitted, however, to listen to him, seeing that his weighty confidences would not be brooked; and when he had finished—he said what he had to say in very few words—she glanced up at him with the same air of impenetrable indifference.
"Come!" she said, "what does it matter to me that you acted in exceedingly bad taste, and repent it? It made no difference to me—I am not the police des moeurs. If I were you, I would hold my tongue."
Then she added, as he glanced at her with evident mystification, shrugging her shoulders:
"When one is dead, Mr. Sylvester, what does it matter?"
He turned away rather impatiently, his eyes following the fine lines of Mary's face, which he saw in profile.
He noticed that she talked with animation, and that Lord Overstock's expression was frankly admiring. At last the old lady said: