As if she had been presiding at that table all her life, Miss Payne arose, bowed to the two men, and preceding the two astonished ladies, swept from the dining-room.
Cora, as she followed the graceful figure, could hardly restrain her mortification and rage. She felt a longing amounting almost to frenzy, to spring upon the girl and stab her in the back.
The two men did not linger long in the dining-room. Each felt anxious, for reasons of his own, to be again in the presence of Miss Payne, and so soon joined the ladies in the drawing-room.
After a little more hypocrisy on all their parts, Cora arose to retire to her apartments, declaring that the excitement of Miss Payne's arrival had made her forgetful of herself and her health, and that she began to feel her fictitious strength departing.
Madeline, too, arose, and offering her arm to Cora, said that she would also retire. Nodding a careless good-night to the three deserted ones, she left the room, with the fair invalid leaning languidly upon her arm.
To the surprise and dissatisfaction of Cora, Madeline not only accompanied her to her own apartment, but entered with her. Having closed the door carefully behind them, she turned about, and dropping all her assumed gayety and friendliness, said with the air of a queen commanding a subject:
"Now, Mrs. Arthur, let us understand each other!"
The sudden and marked change of her voice and manner startled the woman out of all her self-possession. She stood staring in the stern face of the girl with all of the audacity frightened out of her own.
Cora was an adventuress to the tips of her fingers. She was fond of intrigue; she possessed a certain kind of courage; but she was, after all, at heart, a coward. She was quite willing to compromise her soul for gain, but not her body. In short, she loved herself too well to find any piquancy in personal danger.
Since the loss of the papers and the flight of Céline Leroque had shaken her feeling of security, Cora had been restive and anxious to bring this plot to a climax. She had found it not at all to her taste to have Percy holding over her head a sword, be it ever so slender. And now, as she confronted Madeline, all her selfishness was alarmed. She waited in absolute fear the next words from the lips of her enemy.