"Will you come to Powyss Place on Thursday next?" she asked. "I hardly like to press you, Inez, under the circumstances. For poor Victor's sake I want to make the best of it. I give a dinner party, as you know; invite all our friends, and present Lady Catheron. There is no help for it. If I take her up, all the country will; but if you had rather not appear, Inez—"
There was a sharp, quick, warning flash from the black eyes.
"Why should I not appear? Victor may be a coward—I am not. I will go. I will face our whole visiting list, and defy them to pity me. Take up the soap-boiler's heiress by all means, but, powerful as you are, I doubt if even you will be able to keep her afloat. Try the experiment—give the dinner party—I will be there."
"It's a very fine thing for a tradesman's daughter to marry a rich baronet, no doubt," commented Lady Helena, as she was driven home; "but, with Inez for my rival, I shouldn't care to risk it. I only hope, for my sake at least, she will let the poor thing alone next Thursday."
The "poor thing" indeed! If Sir Victor's life had been badgered during the past fortnight, his wife's life had been rendered nearly unendurable. Inez knew so well how to stab, and she never spared a thrust. It was wonderful, the bitterest, stinging things she could say over and over again, in her slow, legato tones. She never spared. Her tongue was a two-edged sword, and the black deriding eyes looked pitilessly on her victim's writhes and quivers. And Ethel bore it. She loved her husband—he feared his cousin—for his sake she endured. Only once, after some trebly cruel stab, she had cried aloud in her passionate pain:
"I can't endure it, Victor—I cannot! She will kill me. Take me back to London, to Russell Square, anywhere away from your dreadful cousin!"
He had soothed her as best he might, and riding over to Powyss Place, had given his aunt that warning.
"It will seem a horribly cruel and inhuman thing to turn her from the home where she has reigned mistress so long," he said to himself. "I will never be able to hold up my head in the county after—but she must let Ethel alone. By fair means or foul she must."
The day of Lady Helena Powyss' party came—a terrible ordeal for Ethel. She had grown miserably nervous under the life she had led the past two weeks—the ceaseless mockery of Miss Catheron's soft, scornful tones, the silent contempt and derision of her hard black eyes. What should she wear? how should she act? What if she made some absurd blunder, betraying her plebeian birth and breeding? What if she mortified her thin-skinned husband? Oh! why was it necessary to go at all?
"My dear child," her husband said, kissing her good-humoredly, "it isn't worth that despairing face. Just put on one of your pretty dinner-dresses, a flower in your hair, and your pearls. Be your own simple, natural, dear little self, and there will not be a lady at Aunt Helena's able to shine you down."