"Then you won't get less, my dear man. Gracious, haven't I dandled you on my knee and slapped you and stuffed you with cakes and--"
"You have been always good, and that is why I don't like to impose on you."
Lady Sanby laughed grimly. "You needn't be afraid of doing that, Ralph. No one, old or young, ever succeeded in imposing upon me. Now, take your wedding-present and marry Audrey. And, by the way," added the old dame, just as if it was an after-thought, "you had better let me know the time and place. I shall come to the wedding. It will look better for Audrey, and that parvenu father of hers won't dare to say a word when I bestow my approval."
"Grannie, you are an angel," and Ralph, very greatly touched by her kindness, kissed her warmly.
Grannie pushed him away. "Keep your kisses and nice words for Audrey, or she will grow jealous. Now run away. I have heaps to do, and I can't afford to waste my time as a briefless barrister does."
"Briefless," laughed Ralph, who was now, and with very good reason, in excellent spirits. "Well, grannie, I only ask that you will retain me as Counsel in the breach of promise case you are sure to have with one of your numerous admirers!"--a joke which pleased the gay old lady immensely.
Shawe departed, and paid the welcome cheque into his bank. He could now afford to marry Audrey at once, and take her away from all the soiled circumstances of her life. He felt duly grateful to Madame Coralie, but he did not wish Audrey, when she was Mrs. Shawe, to see more of her than was consistent with her being a relation. For the moment he felt inclined to go to Walpole Lane and tell Audrey all about Lady Sanby's offer and her kindness in giving him such a welcome wedding-present; but he knew that Audrey would be disappointed if he had nothing to tell about Miss Pearl, so resolved before he again sought the Pink Shop to see the lady in question.
Miss Pearl wrote and said that she would be pleased to see him at the time he mentioned. Therefore, the next morning, Ralph duly walked to the quiet house in the quiet Bloomsbury Square wherein Miss Pearl had her rooms. A demure maidservant admitted him into the house and conducted him up the wide staircase--it was an old Georgian mansion--to the sitting-room of the lady. When she departed to tell Miss Pearl that her visitor had arrived, the young barrister glanced round the room to see if he could gather from its furnishing what the character of the future Lady Branwin was like. It struck him--oddly enough, considering her profession of dancer and singer--that she was something of a Puritan.
The room was spacious and had a lofty ceiling painted with wreaths of flowers and love-knots of blue ribbon. Under this roof, which suggested gay Pompadour fancies, the room looked cold and drab. The furniture was of a dark wood upholstered in dark green. The windows--two French windows which opened on to an iron balcony--were draped with green curtains, and the carpet was also green, without any pattern. In the centre of the apartment was a prim table on which books were placed at regular intervals. One of these books Shawe found to be the Pilgrim's Progress, and another was the Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family. He felt rather astonished as this was not the class of literature he expected Miss Pearl to favour. Then the room was altogether so stiff and formal, and so deadly cold, in spite of its being warm in the open air, that the barrister was puzzled. "I must have been shown into the apartment of some missionary by mistake," was his reflection, and he sat down greatly bewildered. "A woman who dances at a music-hall can't possibly like to live in such a room; but I always heard that she was aggressively respectable."
His reflections were cut short by the stately entrance of the lady he was thinking about. And Miss Pearl was stately, being a tall and nobly-formed woman, who walked in quite a majestic way. She had large feet, large hands, a large bust, and large limbs--indeed, she was large in every way, and looked more like the Venus of Milo than a modern woman. Her face was pale and grave and clear-cut, and she had a rather severe mouth with compressed lips. To add to her resemblance to the heathen goddess, her hair was smoothed back from her marble forehead and coiled behind in a simple Greek knot. In a calm and graceful way she moved forward, with her large brown unwinking eyes fastened on the bewildered face of the young man. Those eyes almost hypnotised Ralph, for their gaze was so steady, and made him think that after all she was less like Venus than like the ox-eyed Juno.