She thought he alluded to his marriage. She stood something like a statue, feeling cruelly wronged, but loving him beyond everything in life. Not wronged by him: it was fate that wronged her: he would have loved her still, had he dared, and she felt that he honoured her in all tenderness. She felt--and the hot crimson came dyeing her face at the thought--that he loved her better than that other one.
The rebellious tears welled up to her eyes, and she turned her face away. "Are you going to be absent long?" she asked, trying to speak indifferently.
"I think so. How long I cannot tell yet. I am going to Spain."
There was a pause of silence. Sara, with an air of unconcern, began putting straight the crape folds on her dress skirt. Oswald turned to the door.
"Where can Caroline be?" he exclaimed. "Did you say she had gone down in search of me?"
"Not Caroline. It is not Caroline. It is Mrs. Cray, Mark's mother. I came out with her to show her the way to different places, but I did not know she was going to bring me here."
"Mark's mother!" But ere Oswald could say more, Mrs. Cray appeared. She had found her way into Mr. Street's room downstairs, thinking it might be Oswald's, and had remained making acquaintance with that gentleman. Oswald Cray the rising engineer, and Oswald Cray the interloping little son in her husband's house, were essentially two people in the worldly mind of Mrs. Cray.
[CHAPTER XLVI.]
AN UNWELCOME VISITOR.
Mark Cray and his wife were attiring themselves by gas-light for some scene of evening gaiety. The past fortnight--for that period had elapsed since the arrival of Mrs. Cray in London--had brought nothing else but gaiety. Shopping in the morning, drives in the afternoon, whitebait dinners at Blackwell or Greenwich, dinners at Richmond, theatres in the evening, receptions at home, parties out; noise, bustle, whirl, and cost. Caroline loved the life; were it taken from her, she said randomly to Mrs. Cray one day, she could not survive, she should die of ennui; and the Miss Crays had never been so happy in their lives, or their mother either.