The old woman read her letter with patience and with cynicism.
“It will serve,” said she. “Send it immediately.”
And then, as they say in the best fiction, a strange thing happened. The most natural and becoming course for Miss Burden to take was to ring the bell, in order that this curious document might be dispatched by a servant. But she did not do this. In her own person Miss Burden went forth of the room, and without waiting to put on her hat she passed out at the hall door, and with her own hand dropped the letter in the pillar-box opposite.
CHAPTER III
LORD CHERITON LOOKS IN
THREE days later there was delivered in Hill Street a letter bearing the west-country postmark. It was written in narrow, upright characters, which seemed to bear a shade of defiance in them. The envelope was inscribed with some formality to the Right Honorable the Countess of Crewkerne, yet its shape was unfashionable, the paper was of inferior quality, and was innocent of any sort of adornment.
When this document was borne upon the silver dish by Mr. Marchbanks to the chamber of his aged mistress, and delivered to her in the sanctity of her four-poster, there was a slight flicker of the eyelids of that elderly diplomatist. It was as though with the flair that always distinguished him, he had come to divine that a great event was in the air.
The conduct of his mistress added weight to this theory. No sooner did she observe this commonplace missive to be nestling among those more ornate communications emanating, as Mr. Marchbanks knew perfectly well, from dukes and marquises and earls, and the ladies of dukes and marquises and earls, than she swooped down upon it for all the world as some old eagle might have done with outstretched talon. She read as follows:—
The Revd Aloysius Perry has the honor to present his compliments to the Countess of Crewkerne, and begs to say in response to her request that he is forwarding to-morrow (Tuesday) per passenger train, his second daughter Araminta, who in his humble judgment is the most attractive of those with which it has pleased Providence to endow him.
The old lady, propped up in her four-poster, honored this communication with two readings and with a knitted brow. She was a very sharp-witted old woman, as we are constantly having to remark, and she could not quite make up her mind whether the unconventional flavor that clung to the letter of the man that had been married by her sister Polly was the fruit of conscious irony or of bona-fide rusticity.
“Humph,” said she, her invariable exclamation when in doubt about anything. “An underbred person, I am afraid.”