But what Sir George’s course as a young woman would be his niece is determined for once not to hear.
“Stop!” she says, laying her firm hand in prohibition upon his arm, and speaking with an authority that for the moment seems to reverse their relative positions. “You must not run down my husband to me!”
CHAPTER V
The hall-door reveals an unwelcome sight, though no one can deny that it is a showy one, nor that the February sunlight is snobbish enough to treble itself against the brazen glories of the crests on blinker and harness and panel of the Princes’ carriage. It is a fact of disagreeable familiarity to both uncle and niece that Féodorovna Prince will never allow any of her acquaintance to be “not at home;” and that to be pursued to study, toilet-table, and bed is the penalty exacted from those upon whom she chooses to inflict her friendship. The two exchange a look.
“Do not let her come near me,” says the man, in accents of peremptory disgust, and so flings off to his den; while Lavinia, with the matter-of-fact unselfishness of the well-broken human female, goes smiling into the drawing-room.
After all, it is not Féodorovna, but her mother, who comes forward alone, and with jet-clinking apology.
“You do not mind? It is not a thing that one has any right to do? But Féodorovna would insist on getting out, so I got out too.”
At another moment this exegesis, pregnant in its unconscious brevity of the relations between mother and daughter, would have made Lavinia laugh; but at the present moment a horrible suspicion freezes all tendency to mirth.
“Féodorovna!”—looking round in bewildered apprehension. “Why, where is she?”
The visitor is so obviously in no hurry to answer, that Miss Carew’s question repeats itself with an imperativeness that drags out the reluctant and frightened response.