"We go fast, my friend! And you have hardly known this divinity four-and-twenty hours."
"Love is not a plant of slow growth. Like Jonah's gourd, it springs up, fully matured, in an hour."
"Does it? My son is better versed in amatory floriculture than I am. But before you ask Miss Hunsden to become Lady Kingsland, had you not better inquire who her mother was?"
The baronet thought of the letter, and turned very pale.
"Her mother? I do not understand. What of her mother?"
"Only this"—Lady Kingsland arose as she spoke, her face deathly white, her pale eyes glittering—"the mother is a myth and a mystery. Report says Captain Hunsden was married in America—no one knows where—and America is a wide place. No one ever saw the wife; no one ever heard Miss Hunsden speak of her mother; no one ever heard of that mother's death. I leave Sir Everard Kingsland to draw his own inferences."
She swept from the room with a mighty rustle of silk. A dark figure crouching on the rug, with its ear to the keyhole, barely had time to whisk behind a tall Indian cabinet as the door opened.
It was Miss Sybilla Silver, who was already asserting her prerogative as amateur lady's-maid.
My lady shut herself up in her own room for the remainder of the evening, too angry and mortified for words to tell. It was the first quarrel she and her idolized son ever had, and the disappointment of all her ambitious hopes left her miserable enough.
But scarcely so miserable as Sir Everard. To be hopelessly in love on such short notice was bad enough; to have the dread of a rejection hanging over him was worse; but to have this dark mystery looming horribly in the horizon was worst of all.