"What kind of thing? Stuff! You don't know what you're talking about; shyness is what's the matter with you; and that's a complaint of which little convent-bred girls have got to be cured. Wait till I've tried my hand upon your hair! Come along, I'll start on it at once. Why," she had taken Dorothy's hand in her own, "I say!--whatever's this?--a ring!--on her engagement finger!--diamonds!--and such a beauty! Dorothy, what is the matter with the child? She's staring at her own finger as if she were staring at a ghost!"
Dorothy was staring at Mr Emmett's ring, which gleamed at her on the third finger of her left hand. Until that moment she had been unconscious of its presence--a fact which was a sufficient commentary on her mental state during the last several hours. She could not think how it had got there; to her it was something worse than a ghost; it brought back to her, on the instant, all that she would have been so willing to forget.
CHAPTER XIV
[STRATHMOIRA]
Mr Vernon found Mrs Vernon in the morning-room, engaged with what seemed to be household accounts. As is apt to be the case when people have been married to each other for more years than they sometimes care to remember, morning greetings were with them a minus quantity. He began without any preface:
"Everything all right for this afternoon?"
She looked up from a bill.
"Yes, I think so; as far as I know." She looked back at the bill. "I am confident Barnes has made a mistake, he is always doing it." She looked up again, turning half round in her chair. "But, Harold, have you seen her?"
"You mean Miss Gilbert? I have; and--I'm rather prepossessed with her. I confess that Frances' ecstasies made me a trifle nervous; but so far as appearance and manner go she strikes me as being distinctly good style, as girls run nowadays. But she--or someone--might have let us know that she was coming, considering, so far as we're concerned, that she's a perfect stranger. She seems to have dropped from the clouds; she doesn't seem as if she were the kind of girl who'd do it. Who's the Mr Frazer she speaks of?"
"Mr Frazer?"