"Nothing; but it was a face that had no story in it."
Lady Waterville held out her cup for more cream, and then looked at me with a slight shake of the head.
"I know you now," she said. "Louie, you are just the kind of girl who will marry badly or not marry at all."
I laughed gaily.
"What an awful prophecy, Lady Waterville!" I cried.
"Do you know what it is that writes the story on a man's face?" she went on. "I will tell you—folly, extravagance, sin, and bitter repentance."
I grew graver as I listened. Was she thinking of the very face that I was silently picturing at that moment? Despite her laziness, Lady Waterville possessed the faculty of observation; perhaps she saw all the more of life because she was wholly unoccupied. Her eyes were always at liberty; never being bent on crewelwork or patchwork, they studied human countenances in a leisurely fashion, and it is possible that they discovered a good many little secrets. I felt my cheeks beginning to burn.
"Give me another cup of tea, my dear," she said, speaking in quite a different tone. "The last was not sweet enough. How well those buttercups suit you!"
I had fastened a cluster of large water-buttercups into my bodice, and I thoroughly appreciated the widow's kindness in looking at them, and taking no notice of my blushes. She was talking on in a pleasant, rambling way, and I was gradually getting cool again, when the page threw open the door and announced Mr. Greystock.
William Greystock came in, dark, bland, inscrutable as he always was. He had black eyes, deep-set, and black hair, closely cropped, that lay in thick ripples over his head. As he wore no moustache, there was nothing to veil the hard outline of his thin lips and prominent chin; and I thought then (as I think now) that his was the strongest and most cruel profile I had ever seen in all my life.