"What a gentleman—what an old darling!"—and she—how heinously had she requited his manly but foolish adoration.
"I'll write to him this moment," she said, quite pale.
And she took the casket in her hands and laid it on her bed, and sat down on the side of it, and trembled very much, and suddenly burst into tears, insomuch that her maid was startled, and yielding forthwith to her sympathy, largely leavened with curiosity, she came and stood by her and administered such consolation as people will who know nothing of your particular grief, and like, perhaps, to discover its causes.
But after a while her mistress asked her impatiently what she meant, and, to her indignation and surprise, ordered her out of the room.
"I wish he had not been so good to me. I wish he had ever been unkind to me. I wish he would beat me, Good Heaven! is it all a dream?"
So, quite alone, with one flashing pendant in her ear, with the necklace still on—incoherently, wildly, and affrighted—raved Lady Jane, with a face hectic and wet with tears.
Things appeared to her all on a sudden, quite in a new character, as persons suddenly called on to leave life, see their own doings as they never beheld them before; so with a shock, and an awakening, tumbled about her the whole structure of her illusions, and a dreadful void with a black perspective for the first time opened round her.
She did not return to the drawing-room. When Beatrix, fearing she might be ill, knocked at the door of the green chamber, and heard from the far extremity Lady Jane's clear voice call "Come in," she entered. She found her lying in her clothes, with the counterpane thrown partially over her, upon the funereal-looking old bed, whose dark green curtains depended nearly from the ceiling.
"Well!" exclaimed Lady Jane, almost fiercely, rising to her elbow, and staring at Beatrix.
"I—you told me to come in. I'm afraid I mistook."