"Mr. Cardington," she said with subtle mockery, "your part in the performance is plain"—
She broke off, attracted by the unusual manner of the maid, whose hand, as she placed a plate before her mistress, shook violently, so that she overturned a glass of wine. Miss Wycliffe glanced up, surprised at this awkwardness in one usually so adroit, and pushed back her chair to avoid the crimson stain that was slowly spreading toward the edge of the table. Unconsciously all three suspended their conversation to watch the simple operation of putting salt upon the cloth. Cardington, turning his eyes toward his hostess with an anticipatory relish for the rest of her sentence, was suddenly struck by an inexplicable change. Her face had become white in a moment, and she was regarding the maid's trembling hands with curious intensity.
"You were saying, Miss Felicity,"—he reminded her.
"What was it?" she asked, recovering herself with an effort. "Oh, yes. I was about to suggest that your height marks you out as the proper person to hold up the hoops."
"Agreed!" he cried. "If you will stand by and hand them up."
This raillery was only a passing incident, for Miss Wycliffe's mood had suffered a permanent eclipse. The bishop returned more reasonably and with perfect seriousness to the subject of the election, and finally launched upon a long diatribe after the Platonic fashion, with the professor as a sympathetic interlocutor. His daughter refrained from combatting him openly, but he divined and resented her unexpressed opposition. Her attitude was one of finality; her silence indicated an indifference to his opinions more exasperating than words. It was the young astronomer, he reflected, who had helped to crystallise her strange views. His lurking fear that she might one day marry and leave him was aroused at the thought, and his heart contracted with jealousy. She possessed in his eyes something of the sanctity of a vestal virgin, one who must not be profaned by marriage. In such an event, also, his cherished hope that she might complete the quadrangle of St. George's Hall was likely to be frustrated forever. These fears moved him to argue with a bitterness that served only to defeat his purpose the more.
Cardington's participation displayed an animus which hitherto had been absent from his remarks upon the subject, as if the result of the election had stirred him deeply, also.
"I have heard," he remarked, "that Emmet would never have been elected if it had n't been for the support of Bat What's-his-name and the gang that makes his saloon a rendezvous."
Whether this insinuation produced some effect upon the maid, or whether the nervousness she had exhibited during the whole evening culminated coincidently, none present could know, but no sooner had the words left his lips than a finger-bowl which she held fell from her hands and broke in a hundred glittering fragments on the carpet. At this second proof of incompetence the bishop started irritably, and looked at her without a word. That look was sufficient. A professor unexpectedly roared out upon by his class, a clergyman breaking down in a sermon, could scarcely have experienced a keener sense of professional failure and humiliation than the unfortunate girl knew at that moment. To the bishop's astonishment, she suddenly raised her apron to her eyes and burst into tears.
"That will do, Lena," Miss Wycliffe said quietly. "We 've had enough excitement for one evening. You may go; and send Mary in your place."