Now Nouna had begun to speak in all innocence, but when she noticed that her words had some magical power of discomposing the woman who had been discourteous to her, she mischievously slackened her tone, and watched the effect with much interest. Lady Florencecourt’s square heavy face was not capable of any very vivid or varied expression when her usual stolid self-complacency had been frightened out of it. But the lower features quivered slightly, and a vixenish look, which boded ill for her husband’s peace during their next tête-à-tête, brought a spark of angry brightness into her light eyes. Her next speech, and the tone in which it was uttered, gave the same impression.
“Very possibly,” she said in a voice which implied an offensive doubt. “Of course, my husband, when he was a subaltern in India, gave his portrait right and left to all sorts of persons, as young men will do.”
“In India! He has been in India! Oh, then that accounts for it. He must have met my mother there. I’ll ask him.”
And as the voices of the gentlemen were heard in the hall, Nouna prepared for a spring at the door. Lady Florencecourt laid a heavy hand peremptorily on her arm.
“No,” she said in a suddenly subdued voice, retaining her hold on the fragile wrist, and looking down into the little creature’s eyes with some entreaty and even fear in her own. “Don’t tease Lord Florencecourt about it now. I—I want to talk to you.”
She drew Nouna with her towards an ottoman, and invited Mrs. Bohun to join them.
“I quite agree with you, Harriet; it is a wonderful thing in these days to have a mamma to appeal to,” she continued, in a kind of grudgingly gracious tone. “Mrs. Lauriston is quite the only person I know who is not suffering from this horrible depression in everything. I don’t know whether you have heard”—and she lowered her voice to a confidential murmur—“that my husband wants to get rid of Willingham. All the tenants are asking for twenty-five per cent. reduction on their rent, and as you see, Lord Florencecourt has given up the shooting this year. Even I have had to make some sacrifices, and to dispose of part of my jewellery.”
Nouna was touched. Such a misfortune as this appealed to her imagination, and this most unexpected, uncalled-for candour disarmed her antagonism.
“Your jewellery! Oh, how dreadful!” she cried with deep sympathy. “I think I could bear anything but that.”
She glanced down at one of the diamond bracelets her mother had sent her on her wedding-day, and hugged the little arm that bore it close to her breast. Mrs. Bohun sympathised less sensationally.