Just as she comes to this conclusion a loud rat-tat resounds through the big house.
It is not a refined or timid knock, but decidedly obtrusive, yet it does not, strange to say, offend the delicate ear of Belgravia.
Lady Beranger draws herself together, as it were. She has been considerably ruffled at afternoon tea, but she composes her face into the sweet serenity it generally wears before the world.
“Show Mr. Stubbs in,” she desires, when the powdered flunkey hands her a card. “And, Theophrastus! not at home to any other visitors.”
She knows that the gentlemen staying at Sandilands have driven some distance, and are not likely to be back till dinner-time. So she is safe to prepare the way for Trixy’s future benefit. After all, is it worth while to envy Lady Beranger her charming home? or would not a dinner of herbs, when love and truth and honesty abound, be preferable to the stalled ox, and strife and scheming?
“How do you do, Mr. Stubbs?” she says, graciously, when a short, very obese man, and plain of feature, walks into the boudoir. He is very red in the face, both from exercise and from fond expectations, and he is not very ready of speech.
Lady Beranger eyes him keenly a moment from the top of his shining bald head to the foot, which is dumpy and decidedly plebeian.
He is certainly not a typical lover for the fairest débutante of 1886. But what matters?
He is Peter Stubbs, with a superb mansion in Park Lane, a gem of a place in Hampshire, and fifty thousand a year.
Does it signify one atom if he is as hideous as a gorilla, or as old as Mount Horeb?