Mrs. Freeman was interrupted. A lovely-looking girl—girl she looked, though she may have been seven or eight-and-twenty—appeared at the door of one of the rooms in the wing. Her dress was white; she wore a beautiful little head-dress of lace and lavender ribbons, and she came forward, smiling.
"I heard you had arrived, Emily dear, and should have joined you all yesterday, but I was so poorly," she said, clasping Madame de Mellissie's hand. "How well you look!"
"And you look well also," replied Emily. "We must never judge you by your looks, Mrs. Chandos."
"No, that you must not: I always look in rude health, in spite of my ailments," answered Mrs. Chandos. "Will you not come and sit with me for half an hour?"
"Of course I will," was Madame de Mellissie's reply, as she untied her bonnet and threw it to me carelessly, speaking as careless words.
"Have the goodness to tell Mr. Chandos that I am not going out yet." Mrs. Chandos, who had not noticed me before, turned in surprise, and looked at me; but Madame de Mellissie did not, I suppose, deem me worth an introduction.
I went downstairs to deliver her message. Mr. Chandos was waiting in the oak-parlour, talking to his mother.
"Madame de Mellissie has desired me to say that she will not go out yet, sir."
"I did not expect she would," he answered, with a slight laugh, "for she is changeable as the wind. Tell her so from me, will you, Miss Hereford?"
He bent his dark blue eyes upon me with a half-saucy glance, as if intimating that he meant what he said.