Austin came in five minutes afterwards. The boys had been scuttled off to take their evening meal in the kitchen—a darksome cupboard about eight feet square—where the tawdry servant was perpetually stewing savoury messes upon a small charcoal stove.
Bessie handed her husband the ten-pound note, and twelve bright napoleons.
"Why, what's this?" he asked.
"The—the money for the locket, Austin. I thought you might be late home; so I ran round to the Quai with it myself. And I asked for twenty pounds, and the man gave it to me."
"Why, that's a brave girl!" cried Austin, kissing the pleading face uplifted to his. "I don't believe they'd have given me as much. An English tenner, though; that's odd!" he added carelessly, and then slipped the cash loose into his pocket, with the air of a man for whom money is at best a temporary possession.
* * * * *
CHAPTER XXXIX.
THAT IS WHAT LOVE MEANS.
The Grangers and Mr. Fairfax went on meeting in society; and Daniel Granger, with whom it was a kind of habit to ask men to dinner, could hardly avoid inviting George Fairfax. It might have seemed invidious to do so; and for what reason should he make such a distinction? Even to himself Mr. Granger would not be willing to confess that he was jealous of this man. So Mr. Fairfax came with others of his species to the gorgeous caravanserai in the Rue de Morny, where the rooms never by any chance looked as if people lived in them, but rather as if they were waiting-rooms at some railway station got up with temporary splendour for the reception of royalty.
He came; and though Clarissa sometimes made feeble efforts to avoid him, it happened almost always, that before the evening was out he found some few minutes for unreserved talk with her. There is little need to record such brief stolen interviews—a few hurried words by the piano, a sentence or two in a lowered voice at parting. There was not much in the words perhaps—only very common words, that have done duty between thousands of men and women—a kind of signal code, as it were; and yet they had power to poison Clarissa's life, to take the sweetness out of every joy, even a mother's innocent idolatry of her child.