“Why, it isn’t much longer than a boy’s. I might as well say I couldn’t do mine. I’ll be your maid to-night.”
She made no objection, but quietly tilted up her chin as an intimation that he might unfasten her frock for her, with such an unusual air of reflective absorption that he stopped in the midst of his careful but clumsy ministrations to ask her what she was thinking about.
“Nothing,” said she, as her glance fell on her scattered trinkets.
“What have you been doing with your jewellery?” And he picked up some of the ill-used treasures and piled them up in the velvet tray. “Why, where’s the pearl necklace that you keep on the top?”
He saw a slight but rapid change in her face which convinced him that he was, as the children say at hide and seek, “warm.”
“Have you lost it? Is that the trouble?” he asked kindly.
“There’s no trouble. I left it at home,” she answered with so much vivacity and mendacious promptitude that George saw it would be of no use to ask more questions.
On the following morning, however, his curiosity was appeased in an unexpected and startling manner. As soon as he appeared at the breakfast-table, he was conscious of a decided change for the worse in the already chilly and depressing atmosphere. If Lady Florencecourt had been cool, her husband constrained, the day before, the lady was an icicle, her lord a statue this morning. Lord Florencecourt avoided him, would not meet his eyes, and absolutely—so it seemed to George—slunk out of the way of Nouna altogether; while his wife maintained all through breakfast such a frigid attitude to both the young couple, that George was boiling with indignation before the meal was ended, and contrived to meet his hostess alone within a few minutes of the break-up of the party. He had some difficulty in keeping the anger he felt from bursting through the formal speeches in which he told her of an unexpected summons which would force him and his wife to curtail their visit and return to town that very morning.
“As soon as you please, Mr. Lauriston,” said Lady Florencecourt, icily. “And as I may not have another opportunity of seeing your wife alone, perhaps you will be kind enough to return this to her”—she handed George a small parcel, through a torn corner of which peeped the pearls he supposed Nouna to have lost—“and to inform her that though, like other ladies, I am forced to submit to be robbed by my husband to deck out another woman, I am not reduced to receiving back my own jewels from her hands when she has done with them.”
George looked at her very steadily, and gave no sign of the tempest within him except the trembling of his hands.