"Oh! no, mother," Oliver answered rather drily, "Why should she have done so—to me?"
"Oh! well—as a kind of hint that I ought to have called. I hope you explained the matter to her? I mean to go there to-morrow."
Boringdon made no remark. He had no intention, nay, he had an instinctive dislike to the idea, of discussing Mrs. Rebell with his mother, and he vaguely hoped that they would never become intimate.
Arabella Berwick was sitting in the little room, originally a powder closet, which was set aside for her use at Fletchings. It was well out of the way, on the first floor of the old manor-house, tucked away between the drawing-room, which was very little used except in the evening, and the long music gallery, and it was characteristic of Miss Berwick that very few among the many who came and went each summer and autumn to Fletchings were aware of the existence of this, her favourite retreat.
In the Powdering Room, as it was still called, Lord Bosworth's niece wrote her letters, scrutinised with severely just eyes the various household accounts, and sometimes allowed herself an hour of complete relaxation and rest. The panelled walls, painted a pale blue, were hung with a few fine engravings of the more famous Stuart portraits, including two of that Arabella Stuart after whom Miss Berwick had been herself named. There was also, on the old-fashioned davenport at which she wrote her letters, a clever etching of her brother, done when James Berwick was at Oxford.
The mistress of such a house has a well-filled, and indeed often a tiring, life, unless she be blessed with a highly paid, and what is not always the same thing, a highly competent, housekeeper and factotum, to take the material cares off her shoulders. Lord Bosworth was nothing if not hospitable. There was a constant coming and going of agreeable men and women in whatever place he happened to find himself. He disliked solitude, and in the long years Miss Berwick had kept her uncle's house, she could scarcely remember a day in which they had been absolutely alone together.
As a high-spirited, clever girl, brought suddenly from the companionship of an austere aunt and chaperon, she had found the life a very agreeable one, and she had set her whole mind to making it successful. Even now, she had pleasant, nay delightful, moments, but as she grew older, and above all, as Lord Bosworth grew older, much in the life weighed upon her, and any added trouble or anxiety was apt to prove almost unbearable.
To-day, she had received a letter from her brother which had caused her acute annoyance. James Berwick was coming back, a full fortnight before she had expected him,—his excuse, that of wishing to be present at the coming-of-age festivities of Lord Pendragon, the Duke of Appleby and Kendal's only son, which were shortly to take place at Halnakeham Castle. He had always had,—so his sister reminded herself with curling lip,—a curious attachment to this neighbourhood, a great desire to play a part in all local matters; this was the more strange as the Berwicks' only connection with Sussex had been the purchase of Fletchings by their uncle, and James Berwick's own inheritance from his wife of Chillingworth, the huge place, full of a rather banal grandeur, where its present possessor spent but little of his time.
There were three reasons why Miss Berwick would have much preferred that her brother should carry out his original plan. The first, and from her point of view the most important, concerned, as did most important matters to Arabella, Berwick himself. She had just learned, from one of the guests who had arrived at Fletchings the day before, that the woman whom, on the whole, she regarded as having most imperilled her brother, would almost certainly be one of the ducal house-party at Halnakeham. This lady, a certain Mrs. Marshall, was now a widow, and the sister feared her with a great fear.