Satanella could not but appreciate a delicacy that forbade further inquiry about the black mare. No sooner had she given vent to her feelings, in the little explosion recorded above, than she bitterly regretted their expression, comparing her wayward petulant disposition with the temper and constancy displayed by her admirer. Sorrowful, softened, filled with self-reproach, she gave him one of her winning smiles, and bade him forgive her display of ill-humour, or bear with it, as one of many evil qualities, the result of her morbid temperament and isolated lot.
"Then I slept badly, and went out tired. The Ride was crowded, the sun broiling, the mare disagreeable. Altogether, I came back as cross as two sticks. General, are you never out of humour? And how do you get rid of your ill-tempers? You certainly don't visit them on me!"
"How could I?" he asked in return. "How can I ever be anything but your servant, your slave? Oh! Blanche, you must believe me now. How much longer is my probation to last? Is the time to be always put off from day to day, and must I——"
"Clara! Clara!" exclaimed Miss Douglas to her friend in the back drawing-room, "shall you never have done with those tiresome letters? Have you any idea what o'clock it is? And the carriage was ordered at five!"
The General smothered a curse. It was invariably so. No sooner did he think he had gained a secure footing, wrested a position of advantage, than she cut the ground from under him, pushed him down the hill, and his labour was lost, his task all to begin again! It seemed as if she could not bear to face her real position, glancing off at a tangent, without the slightest compunction, from the one important topic he was constantly watching an opportunity to broach.
"Just done! and a good day's work too!" replied Mrs. Lushington's silver tones from the writing-table, and it must have been a quicker ear than either Satanella's or the General's to detect in that playful sentence the spirit of mischievous triumph it conveyed.
Mrs. Lushington was delighted. She felt sure she had fathomed a secret, discovered the clue to an intrigue, and by such means as seemed perfectly fair and justifiable to her warped sense of right and wrong.
Finding herself a third person in a small party that should have been limited to two, she made urgent correspondence her excuse for withdrawing to such a distance as might admit of overhearing their conversation, while the lovers, if lovers indeed they were, should think themselves unobserved.