While the gentlemen were smoking and idling in the billiard-room—the same place where Philip of Spain, en route from Southampton to marry Mary, had made his devotions—she entertained Eveline with afternoon tea in a charming little room dark with oak-panelling, with rare old oak furniture, and hangings of ancient tapestry that testified to the industry of white-handed Hurdells in generations past.
Something of ennui, at least, in the young face of her new acquaintance did not fail to catch the attention of the sharp Lucretia, who knew from the first that Eveline's marriage had been an ill-assorted one; yet, she said, after a pause,
'You long to join the gentlemen, I think; they are not far off—only at the end of the corridor.'
'Pardon me, I am more pleased to be with you.'
'Thanks, dear; but I fear that you and Sir Paget are a pair of regular love-birds, and must go through a systematic amount of billing and cooing every day.'
Eveline smiled faintly, but made no response. Did Miss Hurdell mean this as a sneer? she thought; it seemed so.
'Dear Sir Paget!' said Miss Hurdell again, a little irrelevantly. 'I thought love-matches were out of fashion now.'
'She is mocking me,' thought Eveline, yet the rather aristocratic face of Lucretia was as inscrutable as her manner was suave to sweetness.
'All who know Sir Paget respect him—he is a thoroughly good man,' said Eveline, feeling the necessity of saying something.
'"Women always like wicked fellows," says Lefanu, in one of his novels. It is contrast; but it has been my experience that they do.'