"Her ladyship would like you to come to her room before you leave for the opera," she said, as she drew the brush across the soft brown locks.
Diana did not reply.
Yes, she was admitting to herself she had been unreasonable, as her father said. Life was beautiful and wonderful, and she meant to gather all its sweetness and bloom.
CHAPTER III
The rain that battered down the glory of color into the soaked earth of the park had slashed and beaten black, struggling lines against the gray stone-wall of the buildings in Lincoln's Inn. The radiance of the sun never wholly penetrated the court, but to-day the old place seemed like a tomb. In one of the forbidding-looking dwellings, in his solicitor's chambers, sat Lord Kerhill. He glanced around the silent room, and aimlessly took in the array of large tin boxes, with their painted family names, piled high on the shelves encircling the walls. Conspicuous among them was his own. With the exception of a few unattractive pieces of solid mahogany and some large leather chairs, the room was almost empty. Its ugliness jarred him. As he sat there, his face in repose showed that the years had given an added touch of bitterness to his expression. He still retained his well-cut features, and their beauty of line was only a little marred by a certain heaviness that had recently developed. His dark mustache hid the weak mouth with its suggestion of sensuality; indeed, the whole man showed a strong tendency towards grossness as yet only noticeable to the careful observer.
He still had the ineffable quality of charm, when he willed to exert it, which made his selfishness seem to many only the outcome of impulsive youthfulness. In a shamefaced way he admitted to himself now that he was in the wrong and that he had stupidly involved his affairs, but he comforted himself in the same moment, with the fatuousness of self-indulgence, that everything would work out all right. To tide over this difficulty or adjust and evade for a time the demand of the hour had been his policy for so long that he could not realize that an end was possible to the long tether he so often abused.
He had come in response to an urgent summons. Opposite him, deeply absorbed in some papers, sat Johnston Petrie, the trusted solicitor of the Kerhill family since Henry's father came into the title. He was a large, powerfully built man of fifty-five, with a massive head, piercing black eyes under shaggy eyebrows, and close-cropped iron-gray curls above the shrewd face. Henry rose impatiently to go.
As he did so, Petrie lifted his glasses on their black ribbon to his eyes, and said, "I'm exceedingly sorry, your Lordship, but you must give me time to look more closely into that affair before I can venture a final opinion as to the condition of the estate. Besides, I have several other matters of the gravest importance to question you about; they pertain to some business transactions you made recently without my knowledge, while you were abroad."
He motioned his lordship to a chair as though to pursue deeper the conversation, and drew several documents from a drawer. Henry Kerhill fidgeted.
"It's impossible, Petrie. Next week, after the wedding, or after we return from Scotland, I'll have leisure then to discuss these things with you, and I really mean this time to have you adjust everything and set me quite straight."