A wood fire flamed and crackled on the amber-tiled hearth, and the varied colouring of exquisitely bound books, the brightness of rose-bud chintz, and satin pillows heaped on low sofas, gave an air of life and cheerfulness which was wanting in the sumptuous spaciousness below.
"Why, what has happened to your photographs?" cried Sue, looking round the room, where one attractive feature had been a collection of panel, promenade, and other portraits of handsome and fashionable women, in court gowns, in ball gowns, in tea gowns, in riding habits, in fancy dress, nay, even in bathing dress, at Trouville or Dieppe, each in the costume the sitter thought most becoming—photographs framed in silver, in gold, in tortoiseshell, in ivory, in brocade, in Dresden china, in every kind of frame that ingenious manufacturers devise for people with expensive tastes. They had filled a long shelf at the top of the dado. They had been stuck up in every available corner, when Sue was last in the room; and, behold, there was not one of them left!
"Oh, I put the horrid things away," Grace said impatiently; "I wonder I didn't burn them. Who would wish to be surrounded by lying smiles—false friends?"
Sue said nothing; and even here, within four walls, the conversation was still about impersonal matters, the books the friends had read in the last half-year—a subject which both were fond of discussing—the authors they loved, the authors they hated, the successes they wondered at.
After an hour's talk Miss Rodney persuaded her friend to sing, but Lady Perivale was not in voice. She sang "There was a King in Thule" with less than her usual power, and then played desultory bits of Schumann and Schubert, while Sue turned over a pile of new magazines.
They parted without any allusion to the scandal, except that angry remark about the photographs.
"Good night, dear; it has been so sweet to spend a quiet evening with you."
"Come again very soon, Sue. Come to luncheon or dinner, whenever you can spare an hour or two."
The week wore itself out. Lady Perivale received plenty of letters, but they were almost all of them appeals to her purse—programmes of concerts, applications from hospitals, tradesmen's circulars; not a single letter or card of invitation from anybody of mark.
She was not without visitors on Wednesday afternoon; but they made a vastly different appearance in her drawing-rooms to her visitors of last year, and there were no yellow barouches and French victorias waiting in the square. A gushing widow with two rather tawdry daughters, whom she had met only at charity bazaars and an occasional omnium gatherum, and had severely kept at a distance, came sailing and simpering in, followed by two bushy fringes, pert retroussé noses, and suspiciously rosy lips, under picture hats of a cheap smartness, scintillating with mock diamonds.