“Since their bills have not been paid the trades-people will not send in food. Servants will not stay in a house where they are not fed and receive no wages. No landlord will allow a tenant to occupy his property unless he pays rent. It may sound inhuman—but it is only human.”
The cushion in which Feather’s face was buried retained a faint scent of Robert’s cigar smoke and the fragrance brought back to her things she had heard him say dispassionately about Lord Coombe as well as about other men. He had not been a puritanic or condemnatory person. She seemed to see herself groveling again on the floor of her bedroom and to feel the darkness and silence through which she had not dared to go to Robin.
Not another night like that! No! No!
“You must go to Jersey to your mother and father,” Coombe said. “A hundred a year will help you there in your own home.”
Then she sat upright and there was something in her lovely little countenance he had never seen before. It was actually determination.
“I have heard,” she said, “of poor girls who were driven—by starvation to—to go on the streets. I—would go anywhere before I would go back there.”
“Anywhere!” he repeated, his own countenance expressing—or rather refusing to express something as new as the thing he had seen in her own.
“Anywhere!” she cried and then she did what he had thought her on the verge of doing a few minutes earlier—she fell at his feet and embraced his knees. She clung to him, she sobbed, her pretty hair loosened itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.
“Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe!” she cried as she had cried in the hall.
He rose and endeavoured to disengage himself as he had done before. This time with less success because she would not let him go. He had the greatest possible objection to scenes.