Gordon’s hand held the last volume. He had turned to look through the door—a fine, tall, spirit-looking girl, he thought. His observant eye noted her face—a cool, chaste classic, and her dress, rich, but with a kind of quiet and severity.
Yielding to some whimsical impulse, he went rapidly out to the pavement. She was seating herself in her carriage beside her companion as he approached.
“I had just secured the last copy,” he stated gravely, almost apologetically. “I have another, however, and shall be glad if you will take this.”
A glimmer of surprise had shadowed the immobile face, but it passed.
“You are very kind,” she said. “It seems difficult to procure. We saw the sign quite by accident!” She was demurring—on prudential grounds. She hesitated only a moment—just long enough for him to become aware of another personality beside her, an impression of something wild, Ariel-like, eccentric yet pleasing—then she searched her purse and held out to him a golden guinea.
“That is the price, I think,” she added, and with the word “Melbourne House” to the coachman, the carriage merged in the stream of the highway.
Annabel Milbanke’s complaisant brow was undisturbed. She was very self-possessed, very unromantic, very correct. As the chestnut bays whirled on toward Hyde Park Corner, she did no more than allow her colorless imagination to ask itself: “Who is he, I wonder?”
Her fragile, overdressed companion might have answered that mental question. As Gordon had come from the doorway, his step halting, yet so slightly as to be unnoticed by one who saw the delicate symmetry of his face, a quick tinge had come to Lady Caroline Lamb’s cheeks. The brown curls piled on the pale oval of brow, the deep gray eyes, the full chiselled lips and strongly modelled chin—all brought back to her a pencil sketch she had once seen under a table-lamp. The tinge grew swiftly to a flush, and she turned to look back as they sped on, but she said nothing.
Gordon had seen neither the flush nor the backward look. His eyes, as he surveyed the golden guinea in his hand, held only the picture of the calm girl who had given it to him.
“Melbourne House,” he repeated aloud. “What a stately beauty she has—the perfection of a glacier! I wonder now why I did that,” he thought quizzically. “I never saw her before. A woman who wants to read my Satire; and I always hated an esprit in petticoats! It was impulse—pure impulse, reasonless and irresponsible. God knows what contradictions one contains!”