“You got up, you can get down!” says Sir Harry, and slouched up the step, calling to Bates over his shoulder to take the brute round.
She looked at Greville, releasing her leg for the slide. He came forward without a word, but smiling, and she slid into his arms—a good weight he felt her—and so stood beside him on the steps.
“He’s awful angry with me, isn’t he?” she said with a dipping sparkle in her eye and a jerk of her thumb over her shoulder. Her accent was village—he placed it somewhere Chester-way—but not unpleasing, as, indeed, what could be unpleasing in that voice? Her h’s uncertain—that was the flaw. Short of Venus Aphrodite even divinest beauty must have its vulnerable spot, and the great ladies were to jeer at her for this later. But she dazzled the man for all the dropped letters.
“Awful!” he said, “yet I don’t blame him, madam. You ran the risk of smashing the most beautiful thing in the world, and that thing his own peculiar treasure. For I imagine I address Mrs. Hart? The gentleman left us to our own introductions.”
“The same!” says she, dropping a curtsey. “Well, but, sir, you saw yourself how ’twas! Now, the man I could admire would have took me in his arms and said, ‘Emily, that was a sight and a fight I won’t forget, and I wished all Sussex here to see it and cry Bravo!’ ”
“Madam, exactly what I myself felt!” says Mr. Greville sedately. “Shall I carry out the scene as you sketch it?”—and extended his arms.
She laughed like a very minx from between her hair, and ran up the steps. At the top her whole expression changed and, putting back her hair with her hands, she stood there tall in the long folds of cloth, and with a certain dignity about her.
“Sir, I would not have you suppose me always like this, and since I am hostess here, I ask your name and welcome you to Up Park.”
He bowed profoundly to fall in with this new mood.
“Madam, your most obedient. My name is Greville, Charles Greville, a long-standing acquaintance of Sir Harry Fetherstonehaugh.”