CHAPTER VIII.
HAVING assisted, humbly and admiringly, at Mrs. Gaston’s elaborate dinner-toilet that evening, Margaret followed the gracefully cloaked and hooded figure down the stairs and out to the door-steps, when she said a gay good-bye to her cousin and General Gaston, and turned and entered the house. She had been informed that Louis Gaston also had an engagement, and so she had the not unwelcome prospect of a quiet evening to herself. There were some things that she wanted leisure to think out, calmly and deliberately, and as the drawing-room looked very warm and inviting she turned toward it, and had sunk into her favorite chair before the fire, when she perceived, for the first time, that the library doors were thrown open and that Louis Gaston was sitting there at work. The sight was an irritating one. His very attitude and the set of his firm, strong shoulders, recalled vividly her discomfiture of the previous evening, and roused all the quick indignation she had felt then. She was about to withdraw at once, in the hope that he might not have perceived her entrance, when he turned suddenly, and, seeing her, rose and came forward, his face wearing its pleasantest smile, and his manner at its easiest and friendliest.
“Well, Cousin Margaret,” he said, “and so they’ve left you behind! But I can assure you, you needn’t regret it. The party is an old-fogy affair, which will be long and tedious. There’s some glory to be got out of it, I dare say, but I’ll wager there isn’t much pleasure.”
Margaret heard him deliver himself of these affable observations with intense indignation. “Cousin Margaret” indeed! Did he presume to suppose for an instant, that he could atone for the indignity he had offered her, and the positive pain he had caused her, by a few careless words of flattery and a caressing tone of voice?
“I shouldn’t have cared to go with them in the least,” she answered coldly. “I am used to quiet. Cousin Eugenia said you had an engagement.”
“So I have; but that can be postponed, as also, I suppose, may be your meditations,” answered Louis, feeling a keener zest in the accomplishment of this reconciliation with Margaret since he saw it was likely to cost him some pains. “Suppose now you and I run off to the theatre. There’s a pretty little play on the boards, and we’ll take our chances for a seat.”
“Thank you, I don’t care to go out this evening,” responded Margaret, in the same voice.
There was a moment’s silence, which might have lasted longer, but for some symptoms of flight on the part of Miss Trevennon, which the young man saw and determined to thwart.