Mrs. Friend opened her eyes.
"I thought you liked to dance every week-end?"
"Well—ye-es—amongst ourselves. I didn't mean to turn the house upside-down every week."
"Well, you see—the house-parties have been so large. And besides there have been neighbours."
"I didn't ask them," said Helena. "But—we won't have another—till we go to Town."
"Very well. It might be wise. The servants are rather tired, and if they give warning, we shall never get any more!"
Mrs. Friend watched the retreating figure of Helena. There had indeed been a dizzy succession of week-end parties, and it seemed to her that Lord Buntingford's patience under the infliction had been simply miraculous. For they rarely contained friends of his own; his lameness cut him off from dancing; and it had been clear to Lucy Friend that in many cases Helena's friends had been sharply distasteful to him. He was, in Mrs. Friend's eyes, a strange mixture as far as social standards were concerned. A boundless leniency in some cases; the sternest judgment in others.
For instance, a woman he had known from childhood had lately left her husband, carried off her children, and joined her lover. Lord Buntingford was standing, stoutly by her, helping her in her divorce proceedings, paying for the education of the children, and defending her whenever he heard her attacked. On the other hand, his will had been iron in the matter of Lord Donald, whose exposure as co-respondent in the particularly disreputable case had been lately filling the newspapers. Mrs. Friend had seen Helena take up the Times on one of the days on which the evidence in this case had appeared, and fling it down again with a flush and a look of disgust. But since the day of the Dansworth riot, she had never mentioned Lord Donald's name.
Certainly the relations between her and her guardian had curiously changed. In the first place, since her Dansworth adventure, Helena had found something to do to think about other than quarrelling with "Cousin Philip." Her curiosity as to how the two wounded police, whom she had driven to the County Hospital that day, might be faring had led to her going over there two or three times a week, either to relieve an overworked staff, or to drive convalescent soldiers, still under treatment in the wards.
The occupation had been a godsend to her, and everybody else. She still talked revolution, and she was always ready to spar with Lord Buntingford, or other people. But all the same Lucy Friend was often aware of a much more tractable temper, a kind of hesitancy—and appeasement—which, even if it passed away, made her beauty, for the moment, doubly attractive.