“You astound me, Hyacinth! Would you dispute the favours of a fop with your young sister?”
“With my sister!” she cried, scornfully.
“Ay, with your sister, whom he has courted assiduously; but with no honourable motive! I have seen his designs.”
“Well, perhaps you are right. He may care for Angela—and think her too poor to marry.”
“He is a traitor and a villain——”
“Oh, what fury! Marry my sister to Sir Denzil, and then she will be safe from all pursuit! He will bury her alive in Oxfordshire—withdraw her for ever from this wicked town—like poor Lady Yarborough in Cornwall.”
“I will never ask her to marry a man she cannot love.”
“Why not? Are not you and I a happy couple? And how much love had we for each other before we married? Why I scarce knew the colour of your eyes; and if I had met you in the street, I doubt if I should have recognised you! And now, after thirteen years of matrimony, we are at our first quarrel, and that no lasting one. Come, Fareham, be pleasant and yielding. Let me go and see my old playfellow. I am heartbroken for lack of his company, for fear of his death.”
She hung upon him coaxingly, the bright blue eyes looking up at him—eyes that had so often been compared to Madame de Longueville’s, eyes that had smiled and beamed in many a song and madrigal by the parlour poets of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. She was exquisitely pretty in her youthful colouring of lilies and roses, blue eyes, and pale gold hair, and retained at thirty almost all the charms and graces of eighteen.
Fareham took her by both hands and held her away from him, severely scrutinising a face which he had always been able to admire as calmly as if it had been on canvas.