“You were only obeying orders,” he said, and threw the man half a crown.
The gypsy picked it up and glowered after his employer as the latter bent his steps towards the house.
“I’ll drink to your destruction in this world and the next,” he said; “but I’m hanged if I can make out what you are up to. Old Sarah will understand, perhaps. She’s a match in cunning even for you.”
All this time Lord Carthew was learning from Stella’s lips all that there was to tell of her life as it was lived on the surface. She was seventeen last Christmas, she told him, and she believed it to be true, ignoring that first year of life which she had passed in London as the unloved child of a gypsy mother. For months past she had been trained in the correct way of bowing, kissing the Queen’s hand, and backing out of the royal presence over her train by a duly qualified lady, who had attended at the Chase in order to impart to her this highly necessary instruction, and she made Lord Carthew laugh by her lively description of these lessons.
“Don’t you feel horribly nervous about it?” he asked.
She turned her large black eyes upon him in surprise.
“Oh, no, not in the least,” she answered. “All this London trip I should look forward to eagerly, I think, but for leaving poor mamma, and—and for something else.”
He saw by the sadness in her look and the way in which she shut her mouth fast that some especially anxious thought connected with this stay in London troubled her.
“Won’t you tell me what is the other thing?” he asked, gently. “You have already said you regard me as a friend, and it will be a relief to you to tell me your worries, since you say you have never any one to speak to.”
“I don’t know quite how to put it,” she said, as she meditatively stroked her horse’s neck and ears with her whip. “It seems so egotistical to be boring you with so much about myself. But this season, this presentation to the Queen, and the balls and parties that will follow, for which I have been trained so long, what will it all mean in the end, but that I am to show off my graces and accomplishments and wear smart clothes, so that I may attract an offer of marriage? And if any come, there will be no question of love or liking on my part; my father’s intention is just to hand me over to the best bidder. The Chase is gloomy and dreary and prison-like, and I am often very lonely; but it is a thousand times better than to be married to the man who has the highest title and the largest fortune among those who may condescend to take notice of me,” she went on, bitterly. “Why, if I could stoop to such a marriage, there would not be a scullery-maid at the Chase, or a cottager on my father’s property, who would not have the right to despise me!”