Max sat rigidly still for the rest of the evening, encouraging Mrs Marter to stay through the ballet; and at last, cautiously peering round, he found, to his great satisfaction, that the private box occupied by the Brays was empty.
Ella had not seen who was so near, for she was calm and unmoved.
“Bai Jove, what an escape!” thought Max; and a cold chill ran through him—one that would have been more icy, had he known how close they had been to a rencontre. But there was still another peril—Charley Vining might be waiting yet, and she would see him!
They reached the fly, however, uninterrupted, and Max Bray’s spirits rose; but, though he stayed to a late meal—half-tea, half-supper—at Crescent Villas, he was more distant than ever in his behaviour to Ella—so distant, indeed, that Mrs Marter was half-disposed to ask him if Miss Bedford had given him any offence.
It was past one when Max departed; and, hardly knowing why, Ella went to her bed that night tearful and sad, little thinking that it was a pillow she would never again press.
Volume Three—Chapter Fourteen.
The Bearer of Tidings.
Nine o’clock the next—or rather, by the way in which we calculate time, calling by the same title the hours of obscurity and those of sunshine, the same—morning, Mr and Mrs Marter were not down, nor likely to be for some time; but Ella was just rising from the schoolroom breakfast-table, where she had partaken of a pleasant meal of extremely weak tea, sweetened with moist sugar of a fine treacley odour, and thick bread, plastered with rank, tubby, salt butter. The meal had gone off more quietly than usual,—no one had upset any tea, neither had the youngest child turned her delicate hand and arm, as was much her custom, into a catapult, for the purpose of hurling bread-and-butter at her sisters. Certainly, this young lady had made one snatch at the butter, lying lumpy and yellow upon a plate, and had succeeded in grasping it, as was shown by the traces of her fingers; but when admonished therefor, and threatened with long tasks, she had only howled for five minutes, and had not, as was her wont, thrown herself upon her back upon the floor, and screamed until she was black in the face.