"She is living—" said the other; then she caught her sleeve in the table very clumsily, and was a moment or two disengaging the lace. "She is living," she then said rather slowly, "in Paris, I think it is, but this girl has never seen her."
"How dreadful!"
"Yes. Good-night, Rose; do get to bed quickly,—a wise remark when it is I who have been keeping you up!"
Lady Groombridge, when she got to her own room, murmured to herself:
"I only stopped just in time. I nearly said Florence, and that is where the other wicked woman lives. It's odd they should both live in Florence. But—how absurd, I'm half asleep—it would be much odder if there were not two wicked women in Florence."
Sir Edmund was aware as soon as he took his seat by Molly at the breakfast-table that she knew why Lady Groombridge was pouring out tea with a dark countenance. He put a plate of omelette in his own place, and then asked if Molly needed anything. As she answered in the negative he murmured as he sat down:
"Mrs. Delaport Green is not down?"
"She has a furious toothache."
Molly's look answered his.
"I suppose there is no such thing as a dentist left in London on Easter Monday?"