“You’re quite a revolutionary, Miss Fane,” drawled Mrs. Prideaux. “I sha’n’t let my husband talk to you.”
“With your sallow complexion it would be simply suicidal,” Mrs. Merton agreed, smoothly.
Maud Prideaux’s cynicism was pointed by the fact that she and her husband were notoriously devoted.
“I’d trust Lal anywhere,” said Angela Laurenson, half to herself.
“Oh, Lal! but we all know that Lal’s perfection. When’s he coming, Angela? I wonder you exist without him,” said Mrs. Prideaux. Angela coloured, but she stood her ground.
“To-morrow, I expect,” she said. “I hoped he would be here to-night, but he said he might not be able to get off.”
“Then we shall have to be on our best behaviour—” Mrs. Prideaux was beginning, when the gentlemen, coming up, cut short the discussion.
In the solitude of her chamber, Dolly that night took her heart and mind to pieces, and diligently perquisited all their workings, pried into motives, dissected sensations, and probed like any surgeon. She wanted replies to two questions: first, why she was unnaturally indifferent to kisses; second, whether she preferred Lucian de Saumarez or Noel Farquhar. Her analysis left her little the wiser; she got few facts, because there were few to get. As Bernard would have accepted a kiss with unaffected composure, so Dolly in the same spirit could not understand the pother made about the matter; she was gifted with a masculine indifference, or, as Angela Laurenson would have phrased it, with no feminine modesty. Yet, when she turned to the second question, the thought of loving either suitor sent Dolly flying to unapproachable snow-peaks of virgin coldness, where the foot of no man ever had trodden or ever would tread. Dolly married, loving and beloved, the mother of half a dozen children, would still have kept in her heart a shrine of vestal purity. Careless about the borders of her kingdom she might be, but the citadel was inviolable. She came out of her quest little the wiser, but with her mind made up.
She turned on her pillow and slept soundly, till the dawn, blossoming like a golden rose between the clouds, shone in upon her lying between linen sheets which smelt of violets, with all her chestnut hair twisted into one thick plait. The light roused her, and she was up in a trice and splashing in her tub of rain-water; then dressing rapidly, rolling up her hair in a knot, fastening on her blue dress and her plain white apron: in twenty minutes she was ready. Down-stairs she went full ten minutes late, and annoyed with herself and consequently with Maggie, who had been late too—for no reason, as Dolly told her, severely. Dolly laid the table for breakfast, with a pot of wall-flowers in the middle; she fetched the coffee-pot, and put on the milk to boil in an enamelled saucepan, and refilled the shining kettle—all Dolly’s pots and pans looked like silver. She sliced the bacon into the thinnest of thin rashers and set Maggie to fry it. Finally she went to the churn, where she should have been half an hour earlier, praying that the butter might come quickly. She stood at the open window; the sun looked across the sill; a brown bee hummed in, seeking the wall-flowers; the bacon sizzled, the churn gurgled, and Dolly frowned.
“Oo, miss,” said Maggie, pausing with the frying-pan aslant—“Oo, miss, there’s a gentleman coming down the drive!”