The General, Cecil's uncle and guardian, is one of the best-humored, best-tempered, and most laissez-faire men in the Service, but was, for all that, a perpetual dead weight on Lady Marabout's mind just then, for was not he the person to whom, at the end of the season, she would have to render up account of the successes and the shortcomings of her chaperone's career?
"Do you think of proposing Chandos Cheveley as a suitable alliance for Cecil Ormsby, my dear Helena?" asked Lady Hautton, with that smile which was felt to be considerably worse than strychnine by her foes and victims, at a house in Grosvenor Place, that night.
"God forbid!" prayed Lady Marabout, mentally, as she joined in the Hautton laugh, and shivered under the stab of the Hautton sneer, which was an excessively sharp one. Lady Hautton being one of a rather numerous class of eminent Christians, so panoplied in the armor of righteousness that they can tread, without feeling it, on the tender feet of others.
The evening was spoiled to Lady Marabout; she felt morally and guiltily responsible for an unpardonable indiscretion:—with that man waltzing with Cecil Ormsby, her "graceful, graceless, gracious Grace" of Amandine visibly irritated with jealousy at the sight, and Anne Hautton whispering behind her fan with acidulated significance. Lady Marabout had never been more miserable in her life! She heard on all sides admiration of Rosediamond's daughter; she was gratified by seeing Goodwood, Fitzbreguet, Fulke Nugent, every eligible man in the room, suing for a place on her tablets; she had the delight of beholding Carruthers positively join the negligent beauty's train; and yet the night was a night of purgatory to Lady Marabout, for Chandos Cheveley had his first waltz, and several after it, and the Amandine set were there to gossip, and the Hautton clique to be shocked, at it.
"Soames, tell Mason, when Mr. Chandos Cheveley calls, I am not at home," said Lady Marabout at breakfast.
"Yes, my lady," said Soames, who treasured up the order, and told it to Mr. Chandos Cheveley's man at the first opportunity, though, greatly to his honor, we must admit, he did not imitate the mild formula of fib, and tell his mistress her claret was not corked when it was so incontestably.
Cecil Ormsby lifted her head and looked across the table at her hostess, and the steady gaze of those violet eyes, which were Rosediamond's daughter's best weapons of war, so discomposed Lady Marabout, that she forgot herself sufficiently to proffer Bijou a piece of bread, an unparalleled insult, which that canine Sybarite did not forget all day long.
"Not at home, sir," said Mason, as duly directed, when Cheveley's cab pulled up, a week or two after the general order, at the door.
Cheveley smiled to himself as his gray had her head turned, and the wheel grated off the trottoir, while he lifted his hat to Cecil Ormsby, just visible between the amber curtains and above the balcony flowers of one of the windows of the drawing-room—quite visible enough for her return smile and bow to be seen in the street by Cheveley, in the room by Lady Marabout.
"Some of Lady Tattersall's generalship!" he thought, as the gray trotted out of the square. "Well! I have no business there. Cecil Ormsby is not her Grace of Amandine, nor little Maréchale, and the good lady is quite right to brand me 'dangerous' to her charge, and pronounce me 'inadmissible' to her footman. I've very little title to resent her verdict."