Thus Mr. Howard, her self-appointed mentor. He went about praising her. Everybody wondered that a girl of twenty, who had been reared in a rural parsonage, could commit so few gaucheries.
"Few!" cried Howard, indignantly. "She has never been gauche. She is incapable of the kind of blunder Frenchmen call a gaffe. Some women are born with a feeling for society, as others are born with a feeling for art."
In Northumberland, as in London, Lady Perivale's success was unquestionable. Sir Hector's old chums—the shooting and hunting and fishing men—were delighted with his choice, and Sir Hector himself was in a seventh heaven of wedded bliss. One only blessing was denied him. Grace and her husband longed for a child on whom to lavish the overplus of love in two affectionate natures. But no child had come to them.
A child might have brought consolation in that dark season when, after three days and nights of acute anxiety, Grace Perivale found herself a widow, and more lonely in her wealth and station than women often are in that sad hour of bereavement.
Her father had been the last of an old Norfolk family in which only children were hereditary. She had neither uncles nor aunts. She had heard of remote cousinships, but her father had held but scantiest communion with those distant kindred, most of whom were distant in locality as well as in blood.
CHAPTER III.
"I see him furnished forth for his career,
On starting from the life-chance in our world,
With nearly all we count sufficient help:
Body and mind in balance, a sound frame,
A solid intellect: the wit to seek,
Wisdom to choose, and courage wherewithal
To deal with whatsoever circumstance
Should minister to man, make life succeed.
Oh, and much drawback! What were earth without?"
Now began the third phase of Lady Perivale's existence. She spent the next three years, not in utter loneliness, but in complete retirement from worldly pleasures. It was in this time of bereavement that her devoted Sue was of most use to her. She persuaded Sue to travel with her during her first year of widowhood, at the risk of losing that to which Miss Rodney had been a slave—her connection. Grace insisted on her friend accepting a salary to cover that jeopardized connection; and, when they went back to London, it was Grace's care to find new pupils to fill the gaps. When West Kensington or Balham had fallen away, Lady Perivale sent recruits from Mayfair and Belgravia. She had a host of girl-friends—her court, her "Queen's Maries"—and she could order them to have lessons from her dearest Sue. In some cases she went further than this, and paid for the lessons—girl-friends being often impecunious—but this her friend never knew. But she may have been near guessing the truth later, for, after that one Italian winter, Miss Rodney would travel no more.
"I am one of the working bees, Grace," she said; "and you are trying to make a drone of me."