Having selected her most elegant and becoming apparel, she proceeded to make her toilet, and quickly appeared in full evening dress. When the girl had almost completed attiring her, Helen said to her—
“Ascertain whether dinner is over, but not a word that I am here.”
The girl, with an air of mystery stamped on her features, proceeded on tip-toe to the dining-room, and having conferred with the butler, returned, and said—
“Dessert is on the table, Miss.”
“That is well,” muttered Helen, “I will face them now.”
There was a strange expression upon her features. There was no humility: her eye, her brow, her lips were all defiant. Having obtained what she came for, her object in facing her relatives was not altogether clear, even to herself. It was an impulse she could not resist. She knew how little real affection she had experienced from her parents and her sister Margaret; they were all too proud to be fond, and she could not endure the sting of their accusing thoughts or remarks. She had no intention to let them know the truth even now, but at the same time, she wished them to feel that she had acted in a spirit of independent self-will, and that her course in future would be governed by the same influence.
She remembered what she had written in the note she had left behind upon her dressing table, addressed to her mother, when she fled. Its contents she determined to make the ground-work of her action.
It happened that Mr. Grahame had guests that day. There were two very high, very proud, very rich members of the aristocracy, a kinsman of his wife’s, from the north, infinitely more proud than rich, and the young Duke of St. Allborne, who had recently exhibited symptoms of being entangled in the meshes which Margaret Grahame had, with cold calculation and no mean skill, contrived to wind about him.
Helen, perhaps, would have shrunk from encountering this assemblage, had she known that her relatives were not dining en famille. It had not occurred to her to put the question, and she proceeded to the dining-room, expecting only to meet her parents, her brother, and her sisters.
The conversation at the table, when she entered the dining-room, was as animated and lively as might be expected. Mr. Grahame was endeavouring to forget that he stood upon a volcano, which roared, and seethed, and bubbled beneath his feet. He was engaged discussing a political question with his two aristocratic friends. Mrs. Grahame was occupied with her kinsman, and Margaret exclusively with the Duke, alternately flattering him and deferring with the profoundest attention and deference to his observations, so that he felt quite sure that if she did not possess the beauty of many he had seen, she had wonderful discrimination. Malcolm was silently drinking to Lotte, pledging her mentally every time the bottle came round, and Evangeline, still and retiring as ever, was thinking about her sister Helen, and perhaps the young pleasant-faced gentleman, who had lost a sister, too.