“’Steban,” she said, after a time, in a very low and miserable voice, “if I said anything to hurt your feelings, I am sorry for it.”
Still he did not turn his face to her, and she began to wonder whether she had been a righteously indignant victim or a base ingrate. Despite her slavery, she had certainly been well, nay, handsomely, treated. Her health, morals, and education had received enough attention to make them perfect. She had had articles of luxury that the mother of her adoption had frequently protested against as being better fitted for royalty than for a young person in her station of life; and—sharpest pang of all—to procure all this, the man before her had had to undergo not only the frightful loneliness of which he had spoken in the morning, but also toils, privations, risk of life. The thought was maddening, and she sprang from her seat and went boldly up to him.
“’Steban,” she said, with a plaintive sob, “I am ashamed of myself. Will you forgive me?”
He twisted his head away and tried to evade her, but she was resolute. She mounted a chair, leaned one hand on his shoulder, that was quivering with impatience, or restlessness, or wrath, or perhaps all three, and, bending forward, gazed curiously into his face.
One look was enough, for he was quietly and enjoyably laughing at her. She was about to get down, to beat an ignominious retreat to her own room, when he seized her with a murmured, “You small Amazon, I will talk to you by and by.” He carried her across the room. “There is some one coming—sit there,” he said, putting her in a chair. Then, with an impassive face, he held open the door.
Captain Eversleigh was just entering. He threw the flushed, panting girl a surprised glance, then picked up her cap that had fallen off during one of her bursts of eloquence. This did not add to her composure, and she intently studied the pattern of the carpet, until the entrance of Merdyce with a tray effected a diversion. Mrs. Grayley was too ill to appear, so it devolved upon her to pour out the tea.
The fear that the two men, though apparently quite taken up with each other,—Captain Eversleigh in uttering a flow of small talk, and Captain Fordyce in listening,—were in reality watching her, made her hand tremble as she put the sugar into the fragile cups with the butterfly handles. Suddenly and awkwardly she let the sugar-tongs fall into the cream-pitcher.
Captain Eversleigh was so near that the white fluid splashed over the front of his dark coat. She knew by the quick glance he cast her from under his light eyelashes that he thought she did it on purpose. This, together with her recent agitation, quite took away her remnant of fortitude, and she burst into a hysterical, Bacchante laugh. For politeness’ sake her companions tried to join her, but their share of the merriment was forced, and soon languished and died.
In her anxiety to get away, it appeared to her that they would never stop drinking tea. Captain Eversleigh’s potations seemed to her—a girl unaccustomed to the habitual drinking of tea between meals—to be positively alarming, and she ventured a faint glance of remonstrance as he passed his cup for the fourth time.
“You make tea marvellously well, Mrs. Fordyce,” he said, in a high-pitched, cheery voice; “but I shall not be inconsiderate enough to trouble you again. I see by the way you survey the teapot that we are boring you to death,” and, with deliberate haste, he finished at the same time his cup of tea and his discussion of English politics with Captain Fordyce. Then he took his leave, and Nina was about to glide after him, when her husband detained her.