“Isabella!” exclaimed Hero.
“That’s it. The thing is for you to see her. Friend of yours. Won’t refuse to help you. Persuade her to send for George. Tell her not to spread it about the town, though! Get her to coax George out of the sullens, and send him along to see Sherry. I know Sherry: let George but hold out his hand, and the whole thing will blow over in a trice!”
“I will go to Isabella at once!” Hero said, the peril in which Sherry stood ousting every other consideration from her mind.
She set forth immediately, arriving at the Milborne residence just as Isabella mounted the steps, with her abigail. Isabella greeted her affectionately, and would have shown her some interesting purchases she had been making, had it not been plain to a much meaner intelligence than hers that Hero had come to visit her on more urgent affairs than frills and furbelows. She at once took her friend up to her dressing-room, and begged to be allowed to know in what way she could serve her.
Until that moment it had not occurred to Hero that there could be the least difficulty in disclosing the whole of her story to Miss Milborne, but under the steady gaze of those lovely eyes she found herself faltering in her recital, blushing a little, stumbling over what before had seemed so simple and so natural.
Miss Milborne heard her out, in slowly gathering wrath. It was just as she had suspected: Hero had indeed stolen another of her suitors, and Wrotham was as volatile as her Mama had so often assured her he was! If she needed any confirmation of the gravity of the episode, she had it in Sherry’s challenge to George. Miss Milborne was well aware that no sane man would call George out, except under the most extreme provocation, and since Sherry had shown no signs of inebriety at the ball she failed to allow for the exhilarating properties of champagne punch as mixed by the Honourable Ferdy Fakenham. Her bosom swelled, and she was conscious of a humiliating desire to burst into tears. As for Hero’s explanation that George had kissed her because she had rejected his violets, she had never heard anything so lame in her life.
She said in a trembling voice: “I am sure I do not wonder that Sherry should have called him out! But you, Hero! — how could you do so? I had not thought you so fast, so lacking in principle!”
“I am not fast or lacking in principle!” said Hero indignantly. “I was so sorry for poor George that if he wanted to kiss me — just for comfort, you know! — it would have been quite horrid of me to have repulsed him!”
“My dear Lady Sheringham, I wish you will not put yourself to the trouble of telling me nonsensical stories!” said Miss Milborne, in what she meant to be a stately manner but which, even to her own ears, sounded merely pettish.
“Isabella Milborne, I think you are the cruellest creature alive!” said Hero, her eyes flashing. “I would not credit it when George said you had no heart, but I think you have none indeed! How can you have looked at poor George last night and not pitied him?”