“Poor Frank, he never loved me as he thought he did; but I shall win him yet,” she murmured; and then started, for she fancied that she heard a door close.
She saw nothing, though, and paid little heed, for if it was, it might easily be one of the servants in the farther drawing-room, one of the set of three, the third being quite a small boudoir, where she was seated, while the others were only half lit.
She leaned back in her low chair dreaming of the happy days to come, when her husband would return to her, and then her thoughts glided off to Gertrude and her projected marriage.
“I wonder whether I shall have a child,” she thought, “and if so, whether I shall be, in time to come, as mamma is. Poor Gerty! it seems very shocking that she, too, while caring for another, should be almost forced to accept the addresses of an old man like Lord Henry Moorpark. For that’s what mamma means,” she said half aloud.
Then she sat dreaming on and wondering whether some reports she had heard about John Huish were true—reports of a very dishonourable nature, but which she had carefully hidden from her sister.
“It may be all scandal,” she murmured; “but I am getting hard now—so soon! ah, so soon! Where there is smoke, they say, there is fire. Poor Gerty! Better Lord Henry—who seems to love her—than that she should waste her days on a worthless man. And yet I liked John Huish. Uncle Robert likes him, too; and I never knew him wrong, in spite of his retired life.”
But it would be strange, she thought, if both she and her sister should have set the affections of their young hearts upon men who upon being tried proved to be unworthy of trust. “Poor Gerty!—poor me!” she said, half laughing. “It is a strange world, and perhaps, after all, our parents are right in choosing our partners for life.”
Then she started once more, for she knew that she was not alone, and on turning, there, in evening dress, his crush hat in his hand, and looking calm, handsome, and sardonic enough for an incarnation of the spirit of evil himself, stood Major Malpas.
“Nervous, Mrs Morrison? Good-evening. Did you not hear me announced? No? Your carpets are so soft.”
He almost forced her to hold out her hand to him as she sat up, by extending his own, and he took it and raised it respectfully to his lips.