The girl, possessed by one idea, had, girl-like, a certain exultation in the swift ingenuity and dramatic correctness of her arrangements.
Thus dressed for the occasion, she stole out of the house, and when she was no longer within sight of the windows, she took a note ready written from her pocket, and hired a boy to carry it back to the landlady. In this note Lady Bell Trevor stated that she had gone out to take the air for her bad headache, when she found that she must pay a visit to a friend whom she had discovered in Peasmarsh, and who might detain her till late.
This note she trusted would arrive after her husband was deeply engaged for the afternoon, and would serve to satisfy the landlady and prevent her raising any alarm, should she miss Lady Bell. There was little danger to be feared from Squire Trevor after the afternoon was well spent, for politics were thirsty work.
Lady Bell had achieved the first part of her slender programme without misadventure. She turned her steps to the High Street, in which was the Sundons’ lodgings, and reached them without being recognised.
She entered without much difficulty, and still unrecognised, in the perpetual levée held inside and overflowing to the door. When she inquired of a busy maid-servant if she could speak with Madam Sundon, she was pretty sure of a gracious answer, for Madam Sundon could not afford to dismiss any petitioner unheard during these days.
But the house was so full, and the rooms so much occupied, that Lady Bell was detained for a time in the passage, and then told that she must be taken to wait in Madam Sundon’s bedroom, till madam could spare a moment.
In making her way through the throng, Lady Bell found much the same noisy flushed supporters whom she had left behind. One man was vociferating fierce abuse; but not of Sundon—of Trevor. “The ruffianly old tyrant,” the orator called her husband, and she heard the sentence with a thrill of antagonism which she had never expected to feel.
Just so, no doubt, she had railed at her husband in set phrase, but she seemed first to realise vividly, at this moment, that he was her husband; his credit was her credit, and with him, as a result beyond recall, whatever her personal feelings, she must rise or fall.
Mrs. Sundon’s room was in disorder, like the rest of the house, but it had, as it appeared to Lady Bell’s wide-open eyes, many pleasant tokens. There were strewn about little knick-knacks of a toilet-service, hand mirrors in ivory, silver pouncet boxes, either for a man’s or a woman’s use, which Lady Bell had not cast eyes on since the sale of Lady Lucie Penruddock’s effects.
A gentleman’s set of cobweb lace ruffles and frills—of which it was fine ladies’ work, particularly when it was a work of love, to do the exquisite mending—lay, with the needle and thread hanging from the rent, and the gold thimble in an open workbox.