He looks at her with a touch of solicitude, though without a grain of suspicion.
“Have you got a cold? I always tell you that you go too thinly clad.”
“No, thanks; not in the least. Why do you think so?”
“Your voice sounded hoarse, as if your tonsils were relaxed.”
But Lavinia’s tonsils are all right.
CHAPTER XIV
“A côté du bonheur”
“All these things are against me!”
Seven days are gone since Lavinia was called upon to exult over the nursery hangings, and there is no exultation, even feigned, in the tone with which she quotes to herself the words of Jacob, running over in her head what “these things” are. It is “against her” that the search for the missing baptismal entry, now complicated by doubt as to the whereabouts of the register in which it was made, has motived another absence on the part of her bridegroom and uncle. It is against her that this fact has come to Mrs. Prince’s ears, and has brought a hailstorm of invitations, entreaties, and reproaches about Miss Carew’s head. It is against her that Féodorovna, having with a headstrong insanity, even stronger than her vanity, insisted on visiting Binning, has succeeded in improving upon her original malady by an attack of pneumonia, and brought herself to death’s door.
As she unquietly paces the garden at Campion Place, waiting for the Princes’ victoria to convey her to the Chestnuts, Lavinia, dolefully probing her conscience, asks it which of the causes that have added their weight to each other till their momentum has grown irresistible, can be, in any common fairness, laid at her door; and she can detect no unjust bias in her own favour in the “not one” that answers her inward inquisition.