Wrapt in mingling emotions of amazement and alarm, Kate had not heard a light step in the adjoining room; and Lord Effingham, too much engrossed by the passion of the moment, was equally regardless. Both had been standing near the window by which he had entered, while an unseen witness gazed with the fascination of dismay and bitter mortification, through the opposite door, which was partly open.
Something had occurred to postpone the debate which Lady Desmond had wished to hear; and scarcely regretting the disappointment in her anxiety to return to Kate, had left town early, and on her arrival at home, having asked if Miss Vernon was at home, and being answered in the affirmative, walked at once to the morning-room they usually occupied; as she crossed the drawing-room communicating with it, she heard, to her astonishment, Lord Effingham's well-known voice, at the moment he raised it exclaiming—"Why talk of Lady Desmond? I never loved her, &c."—and reached the door in time to see him at Kate's feet, as she had longed to see him at her own. Every syllable of that torturing sentence seemed burning into her heart, as retaining sufficient self-command to retire, unseen, she rushed to her own chamber to hide from every eye, but that of the All-seeing, the awful agonies of a desolated spirit.
With agonised distinctness, she reviewed the last three months, and in the new and sudden light thus forced upon her, was compelled to own, that, had not previous impressions blinded her judgment, she might have seen she was not Lord Effingham's sole attraction in his frequent visits. Then again came the recollection of a thousand allusions to former scenes and passages in their intercourse, capable of a double signification, on which she had put but one; a thousand looks and tones, slight in themselves, but now irrefragable proofs that she had been duped; and Kate, could she have been a party in the deception, she to whom all the weakness, so carefully hidden from others, had been fully displayed, she on whom Lady Desmond had ever looked as the very personation of truth. Impossible! yet why was Lord Effingham admitted secretly? Why did Kate seem so ready and willing to be left alone? Why did she so pertinaciously endeavour to turn her from her unfortunate attachment; and Lady Desmond groaned aloud as these, to her tempest-tossed mind, incontrovertible proofs of treachery rose up before it. "But his influence is irresistible, and how was she to be wiser than I was. Why am I called beautiful?" And she flew to the glass: it flung back the image of a countenance so darkened and disturbed by the storm within, that she shrank from it. "Ah, she has the lovely freshness of youth, and I, why have I outlived it?" Then she remembered the evident joy of Lord Effingham, the first day he met her at Richmond; she recalled the rapture with, which she had hailed that joy, "and but for her all might have been well; if she had been candid with me, how much I might have been spared; but such deliberate treachery." And again and again did her troubled thoughts work round the painful circle of unanticipated mortification which had so suddenly risen up around her; each time returning with redoubled rage and bitterness to Kate's supposed duplicity, for it never occurred to her to doubt that Lord Effingham's love was reciprocated.
How long she had lain, her head buried in the cushions of the sofa, striving to find some loop-hole through which her wounded self-love might creep from the storm that beat it to the ground she could not tell. Ages seemed to have passed since she left the carriage, which had conveyed her to so much misery; but at last the door was opened, and Kate entered, she looked pale and agitated, and exclaimed—
"I had no idea you had returned, dear Georgy."
Lady Desmond raised her eyes with such a look of dark resentment, of concentrated indignation, that, innocent as she was, Kate recoiled before it with the confusion of guilt.
"Ay, shrink back from my presence," said her cousin, in low, deep tones, as if she dared not lose control of her voice. "Traitress! long practice might have taught you more art than to quail at my first glance. Lord Effingham can place full faith in a wife, who, for months, deliberately deceived and duped her friend, leading her to pour forth the last secrets she would have confided to a rival. False, false heart, I loved you, I trusted you; I heaped benefits upon you; I cared for my wealth only because it might be of use to you; and, in return, you have crept into the very sanctuary of my soul to rob and desecrate it; is this the truth, the honor of D'Arcy Vernon's grand-child?"
She had risen in her wrath, and stood—her long black hair thrown wildly back—nervously grasping the back of the sofa, on which she had lain, and gazing with pitiless eyes on the slight shrinking figure before her.
"Georgy, hear me, I implore you," cried Kate, trembling in every limb, and feeling, in spite of her conscious rectitude, as though she was guilty, before her cousin's impassioned reproaches.
"Hush," returned Lady Desmond, with a wild gesture of command and horror, "let me hear no well-arranged tissue of falsehoods. Your very voice is pregnant with dissimulation; go—relieve me of the sight of so much treachery."