"My cousin—he is my own cousin; this was the secret sympathy—the tie of blood that drew us to each other," Sybil was thinking softly, in her timid heart, to keep her courage up, at the very time when he who, without flinching, would have faced a Sikh gun-battery, or a horde of Afghans, was avoiding her, and galloping ingloriously away from what he deemed "a scene—a deuced family row," with a blush on his cheek, shame, pity, and anger mingling in his soul, with the half-formed wish that he had never met and never known her!
Advancing into the room, the mother and daughter bowed, and then stood irresolute. The former had expected to have seen Downie alone; but finding him thus, amid his family, and the General present too, all her pre-arranged and carefully considered explanations and remarks completely fled her memory, and her mind became blank as a sheet of unwritten paper, as Downie, after a rapid whisper to his wife, over whose colourless face there flashed a look of angry scorn, took the initiative.
His wife, with her everlasting smelling-bottle or vinaigrette and lace handkerchief; her newly-cut novel close by; her pale, dull eyes and unmeaning smile; her "company manners;" her soft white hands, smooth and unwrinkled as her forehead, yet cold and puerile as her heart, was always a kind of bore; but now her tout-ensemble had all the impress of insipidity, animated by insolence; for weak though the lawyer's wife was in character, she felt that she was mistress of the situation; and at least pro tem., if not for life, Lady Lamorna.
She regarded the widow with a cold and supercilious stare, to which the former replied by a steady gaze, and each seemed to draw her conclusions of the other in an instant, for "to women alone pertains that marvellous freemasonry, which sees the character at a glance, and investigates the sincerity of a disposition or the value of a lace flounce with the same practised facility."
Downie, too, had his own peculiar acuteness and instincts, sharp and keen, wherever he went; he saw everything in a moment; whoever he met, he read their faces like a book, he marked all their features, deduced their personal characters, just as if he had been intimate with them for a life-time; and a very useful power this had proved to him, in the course of his legal career; and now, in his mourning suit, he looked like "one of those great crows that are to be seen, apparently asleep, in a meadow in autumn; but which, nevertheless, see everything that is going on around them." The gentle aspect, the forlorn bearing, and uncommon beauty of Constance and her daughter, would have softened any other heart than Downie's; but his was like Cornish granite—the oldest and stoniest of all stones.
General Trecarrel—somewhat nervously it must be owned—shook hands with the intruders, for as such they felt themselves viewed; but the dog, Rajah, alone gave them a welcome by fawning round Sybil, who trembled excessively, and could scarcely restrain her tears, while the dog's recognition of her did not escape the wife of Downie, who drew certain conclusions therefrom.
"Mrs. Devereaux, I believe?" said Downie Trevelyan, calmly, and with his professional smile, as he looked up from the table, which was literally heaped up with letters, many of them being unopened; "to what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?"
"You owe it to my sorrow, sir," replied Constance, gathering courage, as her eye caught a portrait of Richard Trevelyan, in his uniform, painted years ago, ere he went to America, and looking just as she had seen him in the early days of their happy loverhood; and now the pictured face seemed to smile upon her out of the past; "to the death of my husband—your brother, as you know, by drowning," she added.
He gave her a stare of cold enquiry, over, and finally, through his double gold eye-glass, which he specially wiped for the occasion, and then turning to his wife, said,—
"Gartha, my dear, take your namesake and the boys with you—retire, please, for we may have much to say that must not be said before you."