"Rich beyond the dreams of avarice—and so unhappy!" she thought, as she hurried off to catch the Chelsea 'bus.
CHAPTER II.
"How blest he names, in love's familiar tone,
The kind fair friend by nature marked his own;
And, in the waveless mirror of his mind,
Views the fleet years of pleasure left behind,
Since when her empire o'er his heart began—
Since first he called her his before the holy man."
It was not often in the London season that Lady Perivale could taste the pleasures of solitude, a long evening by her own fireside, unbroken by letters, messages, telegrams, sudden inroads of friends breaking in upon her at eleven o'clock, between a dinner and a dance, wanting to know why she had not been at the dinner, and whether she was going to the dance, or dances, of the evening, what accident or caprice had eclipsed their star. But on this night of her return the visitor's bell sounded no more after Susan Rodney left her. The quiet of her house was so strange a thing that it almost scared her.
"I begin to understand what a leper must feel in his cavern in the wilderness," she said to herself with a laugh. "The thing is almost tragic, and yet so utterly absurd. It is tragic to discover what society friendships are made of—ropes of sand that fly away with the first wind that blows unkindly."
She pretended to dine, for the servants might have heard of the scandal, and she did not want them to think her crushed by unmerited slights. They, of course, knew the truth, since she had two witnesses among them to prove an alibi, Johnson the butler, and her devoted maid, Emily Scott.
She did not know that the first footman and the cook had both laughed off Johnson's indignant statement that his mistress had never left Porto Maurizio.
"You're not the man to give her away if she had gone off for a bit of a scamper. You and Miss Scott would look the other way when her boxes were being labelled."
"And she'd take a courier maid instead of Emily," said the cook. "After all, it's only finn der seecle."