'Do you mean Captain Wilmot—my son?' asked Lady Julia, icily.
'Yes,' replied Bella, boldly enough now; 'we were such old and good friends that I thought—a little change of dress was but becoming reverence to his memory; and I shall make it deeper still.'
'As you please,' said Lady Julia, bowing curtly, while Cousin Emily rang the bell, and bowed the visitor out.
The two ladies then stared at each other.
There was a deduction to be drawn from honest Bella's deep, pathetic, and unconcealed interest and grief for the poor dead fellow that proved somewhat offensive to Lady Julia, who, amid her own sorrow—or what she considered such—had been considering the fashion of her own mourning—of mourning for the entire household—and of a handsomely quartered hatchment to 'hang upon the outward wall'; thus she was rather astounded and indignant at the rash or adopted bearing in one of Bella's rank and position; but they savoured, she thought, somewhat of the servants' hall in demonstrativeness.
She was ashamed as yet to consult her Dressmakers' Album, even with the aid of Emily and Mademoiselle Florine, anent the most becoming fashion of mourning; but to-morrow she would certainly do so.
'Assurement, oui!' thought Florine.
Anger and no small degree of contempt were in the heart of Bella as she quitted the park gates of Wilmothurst, with a kind of dull and sodden despair mingling therein, as she drove her ponies home in the February twilight to her father's house that overlooked the village green, and she thought how true were the words of Wordsworth of
'Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'