“I would not trouble your papa, my dear, with anything you may have heard. Depend upon it, he will let you know anything he wishes you to know—in his own time.”
“But it is news—news,” said Betty; “news about Charlie!”
Then she remembered that very little had been said even to the Lyons about Charlie, and stopped with embarrassment, and her friends could not but believe that this was a hasty expedient to conceal from them that she had heard something—some flying rumour which had set her little impetuous being on fire. When she had escaped from their sympathetic looks and Gerald’s magnanimous proposal to accompany her—without so much as an egg to fortify him for the labours of the day!—Betty set out, crossing the Park in the early glory of the morning, which feels at nine o’clock what six o’clock feels in the country, to carry the news to her father.
Charlie found, and ill; and demanding to see Miss Lance, his health and recovery depending upon whether he should see her or not! Betty’s first instinct had been to hasten at once to George Street, Hanover Square, but then she remembered that papa presumably was the one who was most anxious about Charlie and had the best right to know, and it was perhaps better not to explain to the friends in Portman Square why Miss Lance should go to Charlie. Indeed, when she had set out, a great many questions occurred to Betty, circulating through her lively little mind without any possibility of an answer to them. Why should Charlie be so anxious to see Miss Lance? Why had he been so long there, ill, and nobody come to tell his people of it? And what was Bee doing in Curzon Street, in Aubrey Leigh’s house, which was the last house in the world where she had any right to be? But she walked so fast, and the sunny air with all its movement and lightness so carried her on and filled her with pleasant sounds and images, that these thoughts, blowing like the wind through her little intelligence, had not much effect on Betty now—though there was incipient trouble in them, as even she could see.
Colonel Kingsward was seated at his breakfast when his little girl burst in upon him in all the freshness of the morning. Her youth and her bloom, and her white frock, notwithstanding its black accoutrements, made a great show in the dark-coloured, solemn, official-looking room, with its Turkey carpets and morocco chairs. The Colonel was evidently startled by the sight of her. He said, “Well?” in that tone of self-defence, and almost defiance, with which a man prepares for being called upon to give an account of himself; as if anything so absurd could be possible as that Betty, little Betty, could call upon her father to give an account of himself! But then it is very true that when there is something to be accounted for, the strongest feel how “conscience doth make cowards of us all.”
“Oh,” she cried, breathless, “Papa—Charlie! Bee has found Charlie, and he’s been very ill—typhoid fever; he’s getting better, and he’s in London, and she’s with him; and he wants but to see Miss Lance. Oh, papa, that’s what I came about chiefly—he wants to see Miss Lance.”
Colonel Kingsward’s face changed many times during this breathless deliverance. He said first, “He’s at Mackinnon’s, I know;” then, “In London!” with no pleasure at all in his tone; and finally, “Miss Lance!” angrily, his face covered with a dark glow.
“What is all this?” he cried, when she stopped for want of breath. “Charlie—in town? You must be out of your senses. Why, he is in Scotland. I heard from—, eh? Well, I don’t know that I had any letter, but—. And ill—and Bee with him? What is the meaning of all this? Are you both mad, or in a conspiracy to make yourselves disagreeable to me?”
“Papa!” cried Betty, very ready to take up the challenge; but on the whole the news was too important to justify a combat of self-defence. She produced Bee’s note out of its envelope, and placed it before him, running on with a report of it while the Colonel groped for his eyeglass and arranged it upon his nose.
“A lady came and fetched her,” cried Betty, hurriedly, to forestall the reading, “and brought her up to town and took her to him—oh, so bad—where he had been for weeks; and she told him you had been to Oxford, and something about Miss Lance; and he wants to see Miss Lance, and calls and calls for her, and won’t be satisfied. Oh, papa!”