“It is very kind of Lady Florencecourt; I shall like to come very much,” said Nouna, who was brimming over with delight and triumph. “Only I don’t think I could do much to entertain a rising member of Parliament. I can’t talk politics; but perhaps he’d like to learn to make cocked hats out of newspaper, and then he can amuse himself when the other members are making dull speeches.”
“I’m sure he’d like it immensely if you will teach him,” said Lord Florencecourt, with cold civility, which would have damped frivolity less aerial than Nouna’s.
The girls thought Lady Florencecourt must have been bewitched thus to transgress her own well-known rule of ignoring any stranger whose pedigree was not at her fingers’ ends. She had, besides, gone so far as to gibe at her brother for admitting “a loose-mannered young woman of unknown and questionable antecedents”—as she styled young Mrs. Lauriston—into the society of his daughters. And now she was sending a pressing invitation by the mouth of her husband, whose prejudice against the interloper was hardly concealed! Decidedly Nouna had a dash of Eastern magic about her. Meanwhile the young lady herself was troubling her head very little with the problem. She was much struck with the blue eyes and curly dark hair of the younger of the two boys, and bending down to him with her little head perched on one side in the coquettish manner she used alike to man, woman, child or animal, she asked with a smile what his name was.
“Allow me to present him with proper ceremony,” said Ella playfully. “Permit me to introduce you,” gravely to her small cousin, “to Mrs. George Lauriston. Mrs. Lauriston,” turning to the lady, “the Honourable Bertram Kilmorna!”
She had scarcely uttered the last word when Nouna shot up from her bending attitude as if at an electric shock, and fixed her great eyes, wide with bewilderment and surprise, on Lord Florencecourt, who was standing behind Ella and his son, near enough to hear these words and to see their effect.
“Kilmorna!” she repeated in a whisper, still looking full at the Colonel, whose rugged face had grown suddenly rigid and grey. Then, without further ceremony, she ran away to her husband, who was talking to Lady Millard at a little distance.
“George, George!” she said in a tumultuous whisper, her face quivering with excitement, “I don’t want to go to Lady Florencecourt’s; tell him I don’t want to go!”
“Why, what’s this? How has the Colonel offended you?” asked George laughing.
“He hasn’t offended me at all. Only I’ve changed my mind. I know I—I shouldn’t like Lady Florencecourt. I’d rather not go.”
But as George insisted that it was impossible to break an engagement just made, without any reason, she broke from him with an impatient push, and disappeared into the house just before Lord Florencecourt, who had abruptly discovered that he was in a hurry to be off, took his leave. Ella prevented George from fetching his wife out.