XIII
One afternoon in December, nearly three years after Mrs. March had left Washington, Lady Carlyon was driving through the fashionable street in which the March house was situated. Lord Baudesert, who was on his annual visit to Washington, was in the carriage with her.
"Look, my Lady Lucy!" he said; "Mrs. March has come back, like another Joan of Arc, to defy her enemies. By Jupiter! that woman is as brave as Hector and Lord Nelson rolled in one. I have heard some pretty stories about her."
Some of these stories related to Lady Carlyon's husband, but Lord Baudesert gave no hint of this. Lady Carlyon glanced out of the carriage window and saw that the splendid March house was occupied. A handsome carriage, with a pink and white footman and coachman to match exactly, was standing before the door, and at that moment Alicia March, accompanied by General Talbott, came out and entered the carriage. Lady Carlyon, whose eyes were quick, got a brief but complete view of her.
"She seems quite unchanged," said Lady Carlyon to Lord Baudesert, "and doesn't look a day older than when she left Washington."
"How keen you women are about this thing of looks," replied Lord Baudesert, his black eyes twinkling under his beetling brows.
"It is you who make us value our youth and looks so much," said Lady Carlyon in response, smiling and composed, though all the while her heart was beating with pain--pain for herself and for her husband.
"Mrs. March, I see, has brought Talbott with her, and Talbott's backing, I take it, is worth that of ten ordinary men with pistols in their pockets," was Lord Baudesert's next remark.
"Sir Percy can never forget his obligations to General Talbott," replied Lady Carlyon.
"And Alicia March won't let him forget them if he would." Then, catching sight of Mrs. Chantrey taking her constitutional, Lord Baudesert halted the carriage, scrambled out, and was soon promenading up and down Connecticut Avenue with that eternally hopeful lady, to her undisguised rapture. She lamented to Lord Baudesert Eleanor's hardness of heart toward the other sex, and Lord Baudesert was lauding the unexpected good sense of the three Vereker girls, each one of whom had married a curate, and could not expect to do any better.