Upon a Sunday morning, when the church bells had ceased to clang, Luckworth Crewe, not altogether at his ease in garb of flagrant respectability, sat by the fireside of a pleasant little room conversing with Mrs. Damerel. Their subject, as usual at the beginning of talk, was Horace Lord.
‘He won’t speak of you at all,’ said Crewe, in a voice singularly subdued, sympathetic, respectful. ‘I have done all I could, short of telling him that I know you. He’s very touchy still on that old affair.’
‘How would he like it,’ asked the lady, ‘if you told him that we are acquaintances?’
‘Impossible to say. Perhaps it would make no difference one way or another.’
Mrs. Damerel was strikingly, yet becomingly, arrayed. The past year had dealt no less gently with her than its predecessors; if anything, her complexion had gained in brilliancy, perhaps a consequence of the hygienic precautions due to her fear of becoming stout. A stranger, even a specialist in the matter, might have doubted whether the fourth decade lay more than a month or two behind her. So far from seeking to impress her visitor with a pose of social superiority, she behaved to him as though his presence honoured as much as it delighted her; look, tone, bearing, each was a flattery which no obtuseness could fail to apprehend, and Crewe’s countenance proved him anything but inappreciative. Hitherto she had spoken and listened with her head drooping in gentle melancholy; now, with a sudden change intended to signify the native buoyancy of her disposition, she uttered a rippling laugh, which showed her excellent teeth, and said prettily:
‘Poor boy! I must suffer the penalty of having tried to save him from one of my own sex.—Not,’ she added, ‘that I foresaw how that poor silly girl would justify my worst fears of her. Perhaps,’ her head drooping again, ‘I ought to reproach myself with what happened.’
‘I don’t see that at all,’ replied Crewe, whose eyes lost nothing of the exhibition addressed to them. ‘Even if you had been the cause of it, which of course you weren’t, I should have said you had done the right thing. Every one knew what Fanny French must come to.’
‘Isn’t it sad? A pretty girl—but so ill brought up, I fear. Can you give me any news of her sister, the one who came here and frightened me so?’
‘Oh, she’s going on as usual.’
Crewe checked himself, and showed hesitation.