“Really, my cousin appears to have secured a most able advocate,” returned Annie, with the slightest possible shade of annoyance perceivable in her tone. “I was scarcely prepared to find you so zealous in his cause.”
Lewis’s face grew dark as he replied in a low, earnest voice, “While I live, Lord Bellefield shall always meet with the strictest justice at my hands! Justice!” he continued bitterly, “it is a god-like principle, and sculptors have symbolised it well—the blinded brow, to show the stern singleness of heart; the scales, to weigh the merits of the case; and the keen sword, the agent of a sudden and full retribution.”
He spoke in a tone of such deep and concentrated feeling, that Annie, as she listened to his words, trembled involuntarily. With the keenness of a woman’s instinct she appreciated the intensity of the feeling and the power of the will that was, for the time, able to control it. For the time!—in that phrase lay the secret of her prescient, terror.
Lewis was too much engrossed by the strength of his own emotions to perceive the alarm he had excited; nor was it till they reached the corner of Park Crescent that he again spoke—
“How did you contrive to become separated from the Countess Portici?” he inquired. “You were absolutely alone amongst those people—were you not?—when I came up.”
Scarcely had Annie informed him of the circumstances which led to her desertion when the carriage stopped.
“The General wishes to see you before you retire for the night, Miss Grant,” insinuated the aristocratic butler, as, leaning on Lewis’s arm, Annie entered the paternal mansion.
“Where is my father?” she inquired hastily—“in the library?” Receiving an affirmative answer, she continued, turning to Lewis: “You must come with me; remember your promise!—I by no means consider myself safe till this interview is over.”
Lewis smiled assent; his unnatural stiffness of manner seemed to have disappeared like magic the moment their tête-à-tête was over, and Annie again restored to the protection of her own home.
The General appeared in high good humour. “You are late, you dissipated puss!” he said as Annie entered. “Ah! Mr. Arundel,” he continued, “I did not know you had been of the party. What have you done with Emily and Bellefield, Annie?”