"It is not my friends' names only I have an unhappy trick of forgetting. I often forget yours, Mr. Redmain!"
"My good name, you must mean."
"I never heard that."
Neither had raised the voice, or spoken with the least apparent anger.
Mr. Redmain gave a grin instead of a retort. He appreciated her sharpness too much to get one ready in time. Turning away, he left the room with a quiet, steady step, taking his grin with him: it had drawn the clear, scanty skin yet tighter on his face, and remained fixed; so that he vanished with something of the look of a hairless tiger.
The moment he disappeared, Tom's gaze, which had been fascinated, sought Hesper. Her lips were shaping the word brute! —Tom heard it with his eyes; her eyes were flashing, and her face was flushed. But the same instant, in a voice perfectly calm—
"Is there anything else you would like to sing, Mr. Helmer?" she said. "Or—" Here she ceased, with the slightest possible choking—it was only of anger—in the throat.
Tom's was a sympathetic nature, especially where a pretty woman was in question. He forgot entirely that she had given quite as good, or as bad, as she received, and was hastening to say something foolish, imagining he had looked upon the sorrows of a lovely and unhappy wife and was almost in her confidence, when Sepia entered the room, with a dark glow that flashed into dusky radiance at sight of the handsome Tom. She had noted him on the night of the party, and remembered having seen him at the merrymaking in the old hall of Durnmelling, but he had not been introduced to her. A minute more, and they were sitting together in a bay-window, blazing away at each other like two corvettes, though their cartridges were often blank enough, while Hesper, never heeding them, kept her place by the chimney, her gaze transferred from the fire to the novel she had sent for from her bedroom.
CHAPTER XXV.
MARY'S RECEPTION.
In the afternoon of the same day, now dreary enough, with the dreariness naturally belonging to the dreariest month of the year, Mary arrived in the city preferred to all cities by those who live in it, but the most uninviting, I should imagine, to a stranger, of all cities on the face of the earth. Cold seemed to have taken to itself a visible form in the thin, gray fog that filled the huge station from the platform to the glass roof. The latter had vanished, indistinguishable from sky invisible, and from the brooding darkness, in which the lamps innumerable served only to make spots of thinness. It was a mist, not a November fog, properly so called; but every breath breathed by every porter, as he ran along by the side of the slowly halting train, was adding to its mass, which seemed to Mary to grow in bulk and density as she gazed. Her quiet, simple, decided manner at once secured her attention, and she was among the first who had their boxes on cabs and were driving away.