"Sir Christopher!" exclaimed Lady Blunt, bursting into tears—but tears of rage, and not shame.
"Yes, my love," said the knight, who was rendered so nervous by this scene that he appeared to be labouring under incipient delirium tremens.
"You're a brute, Sir Christopher!" cried the angel in the pea-green wrapper and the red bows.
"My dear!—my love!" stammered the knight. "It was not my fault—you brought it on yourself—I really think——"
"Oh! I did, did I?" screeched Charlotte; and, unable to control the fury of her passion, she darted upon Sir Christopher, adown whose cheeks the marks of her nails were in another moment rendered most disagreeably visible.
"Lady Blunt!" vociferated the miserable man, struggling to extricate himself from the power of the fury.
"There! now I've taught you not to nag me on another time," said Charlotte, throwing herself back into her chair, already sorry and ashamed for what she had done, but too deeply imbued with vulgar and mean-spirited pride to manifest the least proof of such compunction.
Sir Christopher wiped his bleeding face with his cambric pocket-handkerchief: but his heart was too full to speak. He felt all the indignity which he had just sustained—and yet he had not courage enough to resent it.
The embarrassment of the newly-married pair was relieved, or rather interrupted, by a loud and unusually long double knock, which at that moment awoke every echo, not only in the house itself, but also half-way up Jermyn Street.
A few minutes elapsed, and then the footman entered the breakfast-parlour to announce to Sir Christopher that a gentleman, who had been shown into the drawing-room, wished to speak to him immediately upon most urgent business.