"She does not come to the Red Court?"
"No, thank fortune! She has not been there at all during this past year. I believe she is now too ill to come."
Mr. Hunter glanced at the speaker with a smile. "You do not seem to like her."
"Like her! Like Lady Ellis! I do not think I could pretend to like her if she were dead. You do not know her."
A flush of remembrance darkened the brow of Robert Hunter. Time had been when he knew enough of her.
"She is a crafty, wily, utterly selfish woman," pursued Miss Thornycroft, who very much enjoyed a fling at her stepmother. "How ever papa came to be taken in by her--but I don't care to talk of that."
She seized the poker and began to crack the fire into a blaze. Mr. Hunter took it from her, and he adroitly kept her hand in his.
"Had she been a different woman, good and kind, she might have won me over to love her. The Red Court wanted a mistress at that time, as papa thought; and, to confess it, so did I. A little self-willed, perverse girl I was, rebellious to my French governess, perpetually getting into scrapes, running wild indoors and out."
Entirely unconscious was Miss Thornycroft how mistaken was one of her assumptions--"papa thought the Red Court wanted a mistress." Mr. Thornycroft had been rather too conscious that it did not want one, looking at it from his point of view; though his daughter did.
"Ah, well; let bygones be bygones. You will promise to come, Mr. Hunter?"