“I beg your pardon.” He stepped back with a slight bow.
She put the book aside, and moved towards a. three-backed settee of lacquered wood and cane, and sat down. “You need not. I know you only wish to be kind.” She smiled up at him. “I am not offended with you, for all I may look to be in one of my sad passions.”
He followed her to the settee, and at a sign from her seated himself beside her. “It is Worth?” he asked directly.
“Oh, yes, it is, as usual, my noble guardian,” she replied, with a shrug of her shoulders.
“Mrs. Scattergood informed me that he was with you. What has he been doing or must I not ask?”
“I brought it upon myself,” said Judith, incurably honest. “But he behaves in such a way—oh, cousin, if my father had but known! We are in Lord Worth’s hands. Nothing could be worse! I thought at first that he was amusing himself at my expense. Now I am afraid—I suspect him of a set purpose, and though it cannot succeed it can make this year uncomfortable for me.”
“A set purpose,” he repeated. “I may guess it, I suppose.”
“I think so. It was you who put me a little on my guard.”
He nodded; he was slightly frowning. “You are very wealthy,” he said. “And he is expensive. I do not know what his fortune is; I imagined it had been considerable, but he is a gamester, and a friend of the Regent. He is in the front of fashion; his clothes are made by the first tailors; his stables are second to none; he belongs to I dare not say how many clubs—White’s, Watier’s, the Alfred (or, as I have heard it called, the Half-Read), the Je ne sais quoi, the Jockey Club, the Four Horse, the Bensington—perhaps more.”
“In a word, cousin, he is a dandy,” Judith said.