"I said very little to him, indeed, my dear; he said it all himself."
"What did he say himself?"
"I must tell her—she is so dreadfully persistent," thought the unhappy and badgered Peeress; and tell her she did, being a means of lessening the young lady's interest in the subject of discussion as little judicious as she could well have hit upon.
Lady Cecil listened, silent for once, shading her face with her parasol, shading the tears that gathered on her lashes and rolled down her delicate flushed cheeks, at the recital of Chandos Cheveley's words, from her chaperone's sight.
Lady Marabout gathered courage from the tranquillity with which her recital was heard.
"You see, my love, Chandos Cheveley's own honor points in the same direction with my judgment," she wound up, in conclusion. "He has acted rightly at last, I allow, and if you—if you have for the moment felt a tinge of warmer interest in him—if you have been taken by the fascination of his manner, and invested him with a young girl's romance, you will soon see with us how infinitely better it is that you should part, and how impossible it is that——"
Lady Cecil's eyes flashed such fire through their tears, that Lady Marabout stopped, collapsed and paralyzed.
"It is by such advice as that you repay his nobility, his generosity, his honor!—it is by such words as those you reward him for acting as not one man in a hundred would have acted! Hush, hush, Lady Marabout, I thought better of you!"
"Good Heavens! where will it end?" thought Lady Marabout, distractedly, as Rosediamond's wayward daughter sprang down at the door with a flush in her face, and a contemptuous anger in her eyes, that made Bijou, jumping on her, stop, stare, and whine in canine dismay.
"And I fancied she was listening passively!" thought Lady Marabout.