Accordingly Miss Salter, in great triumph at her own diplomatic abilities, wrote and dispatched her note.
"After all," she added, as she resumed her toilette, "these are sorrowful rejoicings for us, for I suppose with this fine lady coming to dinner, and being so gracious, and all that, she means to marry my father; and if she does, though to be sure it'ill bring fine acquaintance, I suppose, but will it bring us husbands?—on the contrary, if it gets abroad that we're not to have a shilling—"
"We'll have but a poor chance, I'm afraid," interrupted Grace.
"But I'll tell you what I have done to endeavour to obviate that," said her sister; "I have been telling Johnson, and I have told her too that she may tell it where she pleases, for it's no harm that the truth should be known, that our mother's fortune was a hundred thousand pounds, and was so settled upon us that my father can't keep it from us; and she has begun already with Sir William Orm's man, and he has told his master, and Sir William is full of it; so we shall see how he behaves to-day."
"But what a shocking lie!" said Grace.
"Lie! Nonsense!" replied her sister, "Who tells the truth, I'd be glad to know?"
Here the answer to the note interrupted the conversation. It was of course a formal apology. Mrs. Dorothea had not been at a loss to see through the motives of her friends the Salters.
The young ladies now descended to the drawing-room, where Mr. Salter was already standing at a window, in high dress; with the bright white, angular points of a fresh put on collar, contrasting finely with the shining ruby of his cheeks. A carriage with a coronet drove up to the door; bless me, how fine! thought the Misses Salter; it was almost enough to reconcile their father's marrying again.
Lady Flamborough was announced. Her ladyship entered; her round, fat, rosy face, smiling in a round wreath of red roses. Her dress, a colour de rose satin, her ornaments, necklace and earrings of pink topaz.
The broad daylight, or rather sunshine, of the first day in May, in weather unusually fine, and even hot for the season, in a three windowed, south-west drawing room, at six o'clock, did ample justice to the glow of her ladyship's appearance, which nothing less than the entrance, immediately after, of Lady Whaleworthy, in a crimson velvet, could have at all subdued.