Dinner that evening began quietly enough. There was a lull in the hostilities between the young men, Harry being sullen, Wilfred rather sleepy, and George giving all his attention to Lilian, who was in her most brilliant mood, talking, laughing, teasing her eldest brother, and delighting him by her archness; only one person at the table noticed how feverishly bright her eyes were, and the nervous play of her delicate fingers when she was not speaking. For Stephen never took his eyes off her; he drank scarcely anything and ate nothing. Annie was pale to the lips, and the sound of Harry’s voice made her start. Only Lady Braithwaite and William were quite their usual selves.
“So this is the last Christmas I am to spend as Miss Braithwaite!” said Lilian. “I wonder how I shall like married life.”
“Ask Annie how she likes it,” suggested George.
The young wife did not look up; but all could see that a shiver passed over her slight form. Harry made a restless movement on his chair.
“Confound her!” William, who sat next, heard him mutter; and the boy’s blood took fire. Wiser than George or Wilfred in the interests of his play-fellow, however, he said nothing, and clinched his hands together under the table to keep himself from punching his brother’s head. Such acts as that had not been unknown in past times at the Grange dinner-table, and a repetition of them seemed perilously near.
When they at last came into the drawing-room after dinner, after sitting an unusually long time over their wine, Annie was seated—it almost seemed that she was hidden—in the shadow of one of the window-curtains close to the conservatory. Lady Braithwaite was happily dozing as usual, and Lilian was flitting about the room, more animated, more restless than usual. She looked at her brothers searchingly as they came in, they were all talking and laughing loudly and discordantly. Stephen was the only one perfectly sober, and he, white to the lips and silent, was more excited than they. He watched Lilian with glistening eyes full of fear and anxiety.
She had scarcely listened to half a dozen sentences of her brothers when she left them and crossed the room.
“Where are you going? We want you to play something.”
“I think you can amuse yourselves better without me to-night,” she said, with playful insolence—“at least for the present. I’ll come down presently, when I’ve finished my letter to Aunt Constantia, and give you ‘John Peel.’”
She calculated upon their having found some other means of passing the time long before they thought of her again; and, before they could stop her, she had left the room. The little black figure in the shadow of the curtain sprung up, and was at the door to follow her example, when Harry’s voice thundered: