"She has come after him. For what?" thought my lord. "I wonder if the jade knows anything of Charles."
Lady Ascot had steeled herself against this meeting. She had determined, firstly, that no mortal power should ever induce her to set eyes on Adelaide again; and, secondly, that she, Lady Ascot, would give her, Adelaide, a piece of her mind, which she should never forget to her dying day. The first of these rather contradictory determinations had been disposed of by Adelaide's audacity; and as for the second—why, the piece of Lady Ascot's mind which was to be given to Adelaide was somehow not ready; but, instead of it, only silent tears, and withered, trembling fingers, which wandered lovingly over the beautiful young hand, and made the gaudy bracelets on the wrist click one against the other.
"What could I say, Brooks? what could I do?" said Lady Ascot to her maid that night, "when I saw her own self come back, with her own old way? I love the girl more than ever, Brooks, I believe. She beat me. She took me by surprise. I could not resist her. If she had proposed to put me in a wheelbarrow, and wheel me into the middle of that disgraceful, that detestable woman Brittlejug's drawing-room, there and then, I should have let her do it, I believe. I might have begged for time to put on my bonnet; but I should have gone."
She sat there ten minutes or more, talking. Then she said that it was time to go, but that she should come and see Lady Ascot on the morrow. Then she turned to William, to whom she had not been introduced, and asked, would he see her to her carriage? Lord Saltire was next the bell, and looking her steadily in the face, raised his hand slowly to pull it. Adelaide begged him eagerly not to trouble himself; he, with a smile, promptly dropped his hand, and out she sailed on William's arm, Lord Saltire holding the door open, and shutting it after her, with somewhat singular rapidity.
"I hope none of those fools of servants will come blundering upstairs before she has said her say," he remarked, aloud. "Give us some of your South African experiences, Mr. Smith. Did you ever see a woman beautiful enough to go clip a lion's claws singlehanded, eh?"
William, convoying Adelaide downstairs, had got no farther than the first step, when he felt her hand drawn from his arm; he had got one foot on the step below, when he turned to see the cause of this. Adelaide was standing on the step above him, with her glorious face bent sternly, almost fiercely, down on his, and the hand from which the fan hung pointed towards him. It was as beautiful a sight as he had ever seen, and he calmly wondered what it meant. The perfect mouth was curved in scorn, and from it came sharp ringing words, decisive, hard, clear, like the sound of a hammer on an anvil.
"Are you a party to this shameful business, sir? you, who have taken his name, and his place, and his prospects in society. You, who professed, as I hear, to love him like another life, dearer than your own. You, who lay on the same breast with him—tell me, in God's name, that you are sinning in ignorance."
William, as I have remarked before, had a certain amount of shrewdness. He determined to let her go on. He only said, "You are speaking of Charles Ravenshoe."
"Ay," she said, sharply; "of Charles Ravenshoe, sir—ex-stable-boy. I came here to-night to beard them all; to ask them did they know, and did they dare to suffer it. If they had not given me an answer, I would have said such things to them as would have made them stop their ears. Lord Saltire has a biting tongue, has he? Let him hear what mine is. But when I saw you among them, I determined to save a scene, and speak to you alone. Shameful——"