Mrs. Emanuel did not immediately reply, but moved to the window, looked out and then walked slowly back to where he stood. “I am not going to suggest an unkind thought about this girl,” she said, deliberately. “I would not want you to think differently of her, or of the grateful impulse you have toward her. Indeed, I have heard something of her—and it is much to her credit. But—this sounds a mean thing to say, and yet it has its important true side—people should stick to their class. Bear that always in mind. There seem to be brilliant exceptions to the rule, whenever we look about us—but just the same, the rule exists. But—now I will stop, once for all!” She mused at him, with a twinkling eye. “You poor lad, there’s something about you that draws down lectures as a lightning-rod draws electricity. And here’s the trap!”
When Emanuel returned from London a few days later, to report that his young cousin had been comfortably installed in chambers on Duke Street, St. James’s, and seemed to get on capitally with Lord Lingfield, who was showing him the ropes, Kathleen received the news with less than her accustomed cheerfulness.
“I haven’t been quite happy, thinking of him alone in London,” she admitted, in the course of their conversation. “I feel, somehow, as if we should have gone up, and taken a house for the winter.”
“Ah, but, sweetheart,” he urged, almost reproachfully, “you see how I am up to my eyes in all sorts of work. This is really about the most trying and ticklish stage we have gone through yet. If the fibrous silk processes are what is claimed for them, and your girls display the aptitude that you count upon——”
But Kathleen for once seemed not to listen. She had turned, and moved a few steps listlessly away. She took a flower from a vase, picked it to pieces and gazed in a brown study at the meaningless fragments.
“Yes, I know,” she remarked at last, with a half sigh. Then she threw the petals into the grate, and, with a decisive little shake of head and shoulders, wheeled round, and came smilingly to her husband.
“And whom did you see in town?” she asked.