How dark and sullen he looked, I can recall even now. Deprived of my promised partner, Verena, I went down alone. Sir Dace following with Jack, into whose arm he put his own.
“I wish you joy of your chief officer, Captain Tanerton!” cried he, a sardonic smile on his lips.
It must have been, I suppose, about nine o’clock. We were all back in the drawing-room, and Coralie had been singing. But somehow the song fell flat; the contretemps about Verena, or perhaps the sullenness it had left on Sir Dace, produced a sense of general discomfort; and nobody asked for another. Coralie took her dainty work-box off a side-table, and sat down by me on the sofa.
“I may as well take up my netting, as not,” she said to me in an undertone. “Verena began a new collar to-day—which she will be six months finishing, if she ever finishes it at all. She dislikes the work; I love it.” Netting was the work most in vogue at that time. Mrs. Todhetley had just netted herself a cap.
“Do you think we shall see your sister to-night?” I asked of Coralie in a whisper.
“Of course you will, if you don’t run away too soon. She’ll not come in later than ten o’clock.”
“Don’t you fancy that it has put out Sir Dace very much?”
Coralie nodded. “It is something new for papa to attempt to control us; and he does not like to find he can’t. In this affair I take his part; not Verena’s. Edward Pym is not a suitable match for her in any way. For myself, I dislike him.”
“I don’t much like him, either; and I am sure Captain Tanerton does not. Your sister is in love with him, and can see no fault. Cupid’s eyes are blind, you know.”
“I don’t know it at all,” she laughed. “My turn with Cupid has not yet come, Johnny Ludlow. I do not much think Cupid could blind me, though he may be blind himself. If—why, what’s this?”