She could think of no better excuse for seeing Gustave alone than this most sordid pretence. She blushed as she thought how mean a sound it must have in the ears of the man for whose advantage she was plotting. Happily M. Lenoble was not among the people who see nothing but meanness in the desire to save sixpence. His aunt Cydalise had shown him the loveliness of poverty; for there are vows of holy poverty that need no spoken formula, and that are performed without the cloister.
"Poor girl!" thought M. Lenoble; "I dare say even the cost of her coach is a consideration with her; and one dare not pay the coachman."
This was how Gustave read that blush of shame which for a moment dyed
Diana's cheek. Her father's was a very different reading.
"The minx sees my game, and is playing into my hands," thought he. "So demure as she is, too! I should never have supposed her capable of such a clever manoeuvre to secure ten minutes' tête-a-tête with an eligible admirer."
He bade his daughter good night with more than usual effusion. He began to think that she might prove herself worthy of him after all.
The district between Omega Street and Sloane Square is after dusk of all places the most solitary. It is the border-land of Pimlico, or, to borrow from Sidney Smith, the knuckle end of Belgravia. In these regions of desolation and smoke-blackened stucco Diana and her companion were as secure from the interruption of the jostling crowd as they might have been in the primeval forests of Central America.
Miss Paget's task was not a pleasant one. Shape her warning as she might, it must reflect some discredit upon her father. He had of late been kind to her; she felt this keenly to-night, and it seemed that the thing she was about to do was a sort of parricide. Not against her father's life was her cruel hand to be lifted; but her still more cruel tongue was to slay her father's good name.
"This M. Lenoble likes him and trusts him," she thought to herself. "What a happiness for that poor broken-down old man to have so kind a friend! And I am going to interfere in a manner that may put an end to this friendship?"
This is the shape which her thoughts assumed as she walked silently by Gustave's side, with her hand lying lightly on his arm. He spoke to her two or three times about the dulness of the neighbourhood, the coldness of the night, or some other equally thrilling subject; but, finding by her replies that she was thinking deeply, he made no further attempt at conversation.
"Poor child! she has some trouble on her mind, perhaps," he thought to himself sadly, for his sympathy with this young lady was a very profound feeling. This was the first occasion on which he had ever been alone with her, and he wondered to find what a strange emotion was developed by the novelty of the situation. He had married at twenty years of age, and had never known those brief fancies or foolish passions which waste the freshness of mind and heart. He had married a wife whom he never learned to love; but his nature was so essentially a happy one, that he had failed to discover the something wanting in his life. In all relations—as grandson, husband, father, master—he had been "all simply perfect," as Mademoiselle Cydalise pronounced him; and in a mind occupied by cares for the welfare and happiness of others, he had never found that blank which needed to be filled in order to make his own life completely happy. Only of late, in his thirty-fourth year, had he come to the knowledge of a feeling deeper than dutiful regard for an invalid wife, or affectionate solicitude for motherless children; only of late had he felt his heart stirred by a more thrilling emotion than that placid resignation to the will of Providence which had distinguished his courtship of Mademoiselle de Nérague.