"Pray for it yourself, child," enjoined Lady Sarah, laying her hand with a firm grasp upon Adela's shoulder. "Pray upon your bended knees to Heaven, to snatch and shield you from Satan. Most assuredly he has got into you."
"What has got into me?" asked Adela, with languid indifference, not having caught the words.
"The devil," angrily amended Lady Sarah.
That infant of Lady Adela's, little George, did not live. Just for a month or two, just long enough for her to get passionately attached to him, to use every means to make him strong, he lingered. Then there came three days of illness, and the little soul fled from the feeble frame. No other child had been born, and Lady Adela seemed to be left with no end or aim in life, except that of cherishing resentment against Mr. Grubb. She took it up more fiercely than ever, and she let him feel it to his heart's core. The still, small voice of conscience, warning her that this was a forced and unnatural state of mind, could not always be deadened. The very fact of its pricking her caused her to resent the pricks, and to nourish her ill-omened temper the more persistently. Francis Grubb's life was not one of fair skies and rose-leaves.
"I should like to shake it out of her—and I wonder he does not do it," ran the thoughts of Frances Chenevix, as she opened the piano in the next room and began to play a dashing march.
Very especially just now was the Lady Adela Grubb resenting things in general. Captain Stanley—who had set up a flirtation with her when she was but a slip of a girl, and with whom it had pleased her to fancy herself in love after he sailed for India, though that was pure fancy and not fact—had taken no notice of her now that he was home again, beyond that demanded by the ordinary usages of society; and at this Lady Adela felt mortified—slighted. He had not as much as said to her, "So we are both married, you and I; we cannot sit in corners any more to talk in whispers:" on the contrary, he spent his time talking with newer beauties, Selina Dalrymple for one. It was quite the behaviour of a bear, decided Adela; and she was resenting it by showing temper to the world.
Frances Chenevix dashed through the march. Its last bars were dying into silence, when she thought she heard footsteps on the stairs. Going to the door, she saw Gerard Hope.
"Well, and what account have you to give of yourself?" began Frances, as he took her hand.
"I was at a water-party at Richmond," breathlessly answered Gerard, who had been having a race with time.
"Well, I'm sure! And here have I been vowing to them that nothing could have kept you but being run over in the streets; and Colonel Hope thinks you are detained over the red-tape duties. You might have come for once, Gerard."