“Leduc, I am sure, will always be pleased to see you. He, too, is studying manners.”
Rotherby ignored the insult. “We shall see, then, whether you can do anything more than talk.”
“I hope that your lordship, too, is master of other accomplishments. As a talker, I do not find you very gifted. But perhaps Leduc will be less exigent than I.”
“Bah!” his lordship flung at him, and went out, cursing him profusely, Gaskell following at his master's heels.
CHAPTER V. MOONSHINE
My Lord Ostermore, though puzzled, entertained no tormenting anxiety on the score of the search to which Mr. Caryll was to be submitted. He assured himself from that gentleman's confident, easy manner—being a man who always drew from things the inference that was obvious—that either he carried no such letter as my lord expected, or else he had so disposed of it as to baffle search.
So, for the moment, he dismissed the subject from his mind. With Hortensia he entered the parlor across the stone-flagged passage, to which the landlady ushered them, and turned whole-heartedly to the matter of his ward's elopement with his son.
“Hortensia,” said he, when they were alone. “You have been foolish; very foolish.” He had a trick of repeating himself, conceiving, no doubt, that the commonplace achieves distinction by repetition.
Hortensia sat in an arm-chair by the window, and sighed, looking out over the downs. “Do I not know it?” she cried, and the eyes which were averted from his lordship were charred with tears—tears of hot anger, shame and mortification. “God help all women!” she added bitterly, after a moment, as many another woman under similar and worse circumstances has cried before and since.