‘Dear lady,’ said Leo, ‘we have startled you. I ought to have known.’
‘Whom did you say?’
‘I am William Pakenham,’ said the young man. ‘I beg you ten thousand pardons. Swinford has brought me to make acquaintance with—my relations.’
She sank back into her chair, and for a moment covered her eyes with her hand. ‘You must forgive me,’ she said, ‘I am very foolish; but the sound of your name so suddenly in the midst of all I was thinking——’ She paused a little, and then looked up at him. A smile came upon her face. She felt like one who has looked up and, expecting to see some painful apparition, sees instead a smiling face. ‘You are like my Mab,’ she said, tears coming with a rush to her eyes.
‘So Swinford tells me; but I am not like my uncle.’
Lady William did not say anything, but something in her eyes, something in the momentary tremor of her lips, seemed to say, ‘Thank God.’
It was an exceedingly awkward, stupid, uncalled-for remark upon the part of Will Pakenham, who knew that his uncle had been a scamp, but did not know whether or not his wife might have cherished his memory all the same. There are some wives who deify a blackguard after he is gone. But the visitor was young, and this possibility did not occur to him.
‘You have been living here,’ he said, ‘a long time.’
It may be supposed that Lady William was very much shaken out of her usual self-command before she would allow the stranger to take the conversation thus into his own hands, and to begin an interrogatory examination. It was not so much the suddenness of his introduction that had this effect upon her, as the bewilderment of thoughts in which she was involved when these intricacies were thus cut as by a knife, by the appearance of such an astonishing and unexpected figure upon the scene. She began now, however, to recover herself, and to realise that these questions were not at all of the manner in which she chose to permit herself to be addressed. Accordingly, though she smiled in reply, she gave no other answer, but turned to Leo, who stood by watching her, and by no means at his ease.
‘You were telling us the other day of the ladies of the family,’ she said, with a half-reproachful smile; ‘but you did not tell us of Lord Will——’