“Your late wife only died last June then?” exclaimed Sir Ralph, feeling considerably disgusted. “Then I certainly agree with Miss Vyse as to the propriety of deferring the present affair a little longer.”
This was rather a damper even to the obtuse Mr. Chepstow. He looked rather ashamed of himself, and appeared glad to agree to his host’s proposal that they should return to the drawing-room.
“I wonder what sort of a person the first Mrs Chepstow was?” thought Ralph somewhat cynically, as he observed the devotion of the fat lover, the cool affectation and airs de grande dame of the beautiful fiancée. It was amusing to watch the change in her manner already. She had altogether thrown aside her gentle deference and fawning amiability, and seemed to go out of her way to seek for opportunities of covertly sneering at Sir Ralph, or annoying him with ingeniously impertinent innuendoes, and his real, unaffected indifference to it all galled her not a little.
“How can it be,” thought he, “that two women can exist, so utterly, so radically different as this girl and my Marion?” And as the thought passed through his mind, he glanced at Florence. She was looking at him, with a strangely mingled expression on her face. Regret, remorse, even a shade of pity, seemed to cross her beautiful features. But for a moment, and then she hastily turned aside and began chattering nonsense to Mr. Chepstow. But a new direction had been given to Ralph’s mediations.
“Why does she look at me in that way?” he asked himself: “she has doubtless discovered my secret. Can it be that after all she is possessed of something in the shape of a heart that is capable of pitying my bitter disappointment? It is possible, I suppose. Moralists say there is a spark of good in the worst of us.”
Florence, by-the-bye, scolded Mr. Chepstow furiously when she discovered that he had confessed to Sir Ralph that the first anniversary of her predecessor’s death was not yet past!
Henceforth there was nothing but Chepstow. Morning, noun, and night it seemed to Ralph he never entered his mother’s drawing-room without coming upon that worthy there ensconced. He grew very tired of it; but finding at last that the millionaire never took offence at anything, came to treat him somewhat unceremoniously, and found it rather convenient to shuffle on to his broad shoulders some of the gentleman-of-the-house duties so unspeakably irksome to his unsociable self.
The day came on which an answer to his letter was to be expected. It passed, bringing him nothing. Likewise its successors, one, two, and three, and Ralph began to be very miserable. He waited a few days longer, then thought of writing again; but to what purpose? Why should a second letter fare better than its predecessor? Suddenly a new idea struck him. He was walking near the Rue St. Thomas at the time, and acted at once on the notion.
Hitherto he had avoided passing Mrs. Archer’s house. He dreaded the sight of it, and especially of the little terrace; a corner of which was visible from the street.
As he stood now at the door after ringing the bell, he heard merry voices above. He stepped back a little and looked up. On the terrace he saw the figure of a young girl about Marion’s height, playing and laughing with some children. They were utter strangers to him; happy, innocent creatures, but at that moment he felt as if he hated them.