'Bella was at a ball in Willis's Rooms, dancing with Wilmot, of Captain Dalton's regiment, while the colonel was there vis-à-vis with some one else, and Jerry, in the most casual way, asked her if she knew Mrs. Graves. Bella thought he was talking nonsense, but it turned out to be truth, as there is a Mrs. Graves; but, as Bella is a professional beauty, luckily, her affections were not too deeply engaged. However, such affairs are a warning to us all in society. Don't you think so, Captain Dalton?'
But for the shaded lamp, the sudden paleness that overspread the handsome face of Dalton would have been apparent to all at this anecdote of Mrs. Trelawney, who saw that his eyes drooped, and that not even his heavy moustache concealed the quiver of his lip as he took his hat and prepared to retire.
'How strange Captain Dalton looks!' whispered Alison to Goring, as they were parting.
'Yes; poor Tony has become a changed man, moody and irritable, since he has known your friend, Mrs. Trelawney. He is no longer the quiet, gentle, and easy-going fellow he used to be. And now, once again, good-bye, my darling.'
And with a pressure of the hand, a kiss snatched, all the sweeter for being so, they parted, knowing when and where they were to meet again.
Whatever was the secret, unrevealed yet, that hung on Dalton's heart, he left the house of Mrs. Trelawney with a heaviness of soul and gloom of manner that were but too apparent to Bevil Goring. There was a baffled and dismayed expression in his face that made him all unlike his old soldierly self, and on his lips there was an unuttered vow that he would go near Chilcote Grange no more—a vow, however, that he found himself unable to keep.
CHAPTER XI.
A WRITTEN PROPOSAL.
'Devilled kidneys, actually,' said Sir Ranald, in high good-humour, next morning at breakfast. 'I thought the anatomy of our butcher's shop seemed never to include kidneys.'
Alison was officiating at the tea-board in her plain but pretty morning-dress, and was thinking smilingly of the tête-à-tête in the twilighted garden the evening before, when Archie laid some letters before her father, who glanced at them nervously. All that were in blue envelopes he knew instinctively to be duns, and thrust aside unopened. One in a square cover, that had thereon the initial C. surmounted by a coronet, he knew to be from Lord Cadbury, and opened, and read more than once, with a pleased, yet perplexed face, his brows knitted, yet his lips and eyes smiling.