So Lady Linton had to rest on her belligerent oars for a season, though she resolved to be on the alert to act as soon as Mrs. Alexander and her daughter should return.
A couple of weeks later she went one morning to do some shopping for Lillian on Oxford street, and just as she was about to enter a fashionable furnishing store the door opened, a lady came out, and—she stood face to face once more with Mrs. Alexander.
An angry red suffused Lady Linton’s face, an ominous flash lighted her cold, gray eyes.
“Ah! so you have returned,” she said, sharply, and planting herself directly in the path of her foe.
She was looking very lovely—so lovely, indeed, that her ladyship marveled at her beauty. She wore a black silk dress, simply made, but of richest texture, an elegant mantle of black velvet heavily trimmed with jet, a bonnet of the same material, relieved by three graceful ostrich tips of cream-white; and the dainty affair was bewitchingly becoming; her hands were faultlessly gloved, and a single half-blown Lamargue rose had been drawn into one of the fastenings of her mantle, its pale yellow petals nestling lovingly among the rich folds of velvet. There was the daintiest bloom on her cheeks, her eyes were bright, her whole face animated, and she was a woman to attract admiring attention wherever she went.
Lady Linton congratulated herself that her brother was far from London, for she well knew that it would need but one glance at this beautiful picture to bring him a hopeless captive to her feet once more.
Mrs. Alexander slightly raised her brows at her ladyship’s abrupt manner of address, bowed politely, and would have passed on, but the other laid a detaining hand upon her arm, and drew her into a little vestibule just inside the door.
“I want to speak to you,” she said, authoritatively.
“Certainly; I am at your service, Lady Linton,” was the quiet, lady-like reply, and Virgie’s full, blue eyes looked calmly down upon the sallow countenance before her, as she waited to learn why she had been so unceremoniously detained.
“Why have you come to London?” Lady Linton inquired, brusquely.