Mrs. Vansittart stifled the cry on her lips. The slight color which had crept into her pale cheeks yielded to a deathly hue. It chanced that the others were looking expectantly towards the door and did not notice her.
Brand entered. In acknowledging Mr. Traill's cordial welcome he smilingly explained his presence.
"My superiors sent me emphatic orders to clear out," he said, "so I had no option but to obey. I conveyed Mr. Emmett to suitable quarters and hastened home, but found that the girls were playing truant. My housekeeper insisted that I should eat, else she would not be satisfied that I still lived, but I came here as quickly as possible."
At that instant his glance, traveling from one to another of those present, fell on Mrs. Vansittart.
He stood as one petrified. The kindly words of his host, the outspoken glee of the girls at his appearance, died away in his ears in hollow echoes. His eyes, frowning beneath wrinkled brows, seemed to ask if he were not the victim of some unnerving hallucination. They were fixed on Mrs. Vansittart's face with an all-absorbing intensity, and his set lips and clenched hands showed how utterly irresistible was the knowledge that, indeed, he was not deceived—that he was gazing at a living, breathing personality, and not at some phantom product of a surcharged brain.
She, too, yielding before the suddenness of an ordeal she had striven to avoid, betrayed by her laboring bosom that she was under the spell of some excitement of overwhelming power.
She managed to gain her feet. The consciousness that Constance, Enid, Lady Margaret even, were looking at her and at Brand with amazed anxiety, served to strengthen her for a supreme effort.
"Mr. Stephen Brand—and I—are old acquaintances," she gasped. "He may misunderstand—my presence here—tonight. Indeed—in this instance—I am not to blame. I could not—help myself. I am always—trying to explain—but somehow—I never succeed. Oh!"
With an agonized sigh she swayed listlessly and would have fallen had not Pyne caught her.
But she was desperately determined not to faint—there. This was her world, the world of society. She would not yield in its presence.