"I am justly punished," thought Lady Marabout, humbly and penitentially—"justly. I thought wickedly of Anne Hautton. I did not do as I would be done by. I longed to enjoy their mortification. I advised Flora against my own conscience and against hers. I am justly chastised! But that he should suffer through me, that my fault has fallen on his head, that my Philip, my noble Philip, should love and not be loved, and that I have brought it on him——Good Heaven! what is that?"
"That" was a man whom her eyes, being misty with tears, Lady Marabout had brushed against, as she ascended the staircase, ere she perceived him, and who, passing on with a muttered apology, was down in the hall and out of the door Mason held open before she had recovered the shock of the rencontre, much before she had a possibility of recognizing him through the mist aforesaid.
A fear, a hope, a joy, a dread, one so woven with another there was no disentangling them, sprang up like a ray of light in Lady Marabout's heart—a possibility dawned in her: to be rejected as an impossibility? Lady Marabout crossed the ante-room, her heart throbbing tumultuously, spurred on to noble atonement and reckless self-sacrifice, if fate allowed them.
She opened the drawing-room door; Flora Montolieu was alone.
"Flora, you have seen Goodwood?"
She turned, her own face as pale and her own eyes as dim as Lady Marabout's.
"Yes."
Flora Montolieu misconstrued her chaperone's eagerness, and answered haughtily enough:
"I have told him that indifference would be too poor a return for his affections to insult him with it, and that I would not do him the injury of repaying his trust by falsehood and deception. I meant what I said to you last night; I said it on the spur of pain, indignation, no matter what; but I could not keep my word when the trial came."