Her beautiful eyes grew large and dark with thought. The minuet,—the white and gold walls lifted and dispersed like dreams. She saw the hero of her youth— Had he waited, had he understood, she had perhaps had a different life. So she dreamt, foolishly and fondly as women will.
Lady Fanny’s voice recalled her.
“I saw him once,” she said. “The Carterets knew him well. But I was too young. Duchess, in talking t’other day with Bolton I said I wished he might find a woman with all the virtues and graces that should fill his sore and lonely heart. Was I wrong? Do you blame me to turn an advocate for—what shall I call it?”
“Why, Fanny,”—says her Grace, with a shining smile—“How should I blame you? What choice has a man in Bolton’s case? Either he must take the vile pleasures of the town, or sink into a soured loneliness, or make a home with some woman kind and tender that will keep youth and joy green in him. Can I trust you, Fanny—if I say something in my mind? I don’t speak idly, as you know.”
“You can trust me. I tell you I love Bolton—and—I don’t wholly hate your Grace!” says Lady Fanny, smiling also. She stretched her hand behind her painted fan, and the Duchess quickly claspt and dropt it. Little did the Duke know what those fair creatures plotted as he glanced their way idly. How should he? But indeed like all men of his sort he had a great faith in the sex and was very amenable to the guidance of the good among them though he did not know this himself.
The fine couples past and re-past in their minuet, and the Duchess sunk her voice to a thread.
“Fanny, when you came in long since with my Lord—let us say Bas—you came very inconvenient, and I nearly tiffed with you that day. I wanted you gone.”
“Didn’t I see it? Didn’t I go?”
“Yes, to both! I never knew you fail in tact and breeding. Well—was you surprised that day at my company?”
“Astonished. I could make neither head nor tail of it, and still less when I saw her on the stage as Polly. Lord, what could I think but that ’twas one of the Kitty escapades, and that her Grace was eclipsed in Kitty for the moment?”