Neither was Lady Bell’s conscience quite clear. Her prudence—the slender prudence of sixteen—had slept, and the result threatened to be altogether disastrous.
Master Charles was not satisfied with the amount of friendship which Lady Bell had vouchsafed to him. He was pressing for more. His sister’s clumsy opposition, which rendered him surly to her, only made him more eager, open, and ostentatious in his approaches.
Lady Bell realised with a throb of apprehension that this task of keeping Master Charles in order, was by no means the easy task which she had conceitedly conceived beforehand, and set for herself without doubt or fear.
She began to tremble at Master Charles’s youthful keenness, confidence, and daring. He snatched her hand and kissed it before Miss Kingscote’s face. He stole Miss Barlowe’s handkerchief behind Miss Kingscote’s back and kept it. Trifles light as air these liberties were, but Lady Bell could have cried over them with shame and vexation.
She commenced to experience the weakness of wrong-doing in trying to summon up her dignity to repulse the assailant. Though desertion of duty and deceit in a certain measure, were not called by such hard names in Lady Bell’s day, and though those practices had been resorted to by her, half in ignorance, yet she fell back on accusing herself, and was not without a horrified intuition that the tendency of her conduct was to act like a canker in corroding her moral nature.
CHAPTER XVIII.
MRS. BARLOWE.
“Miss Kingscote,” said Lady Bell, very soberly and sadly, the next time that she sat netting a cherry net by the firelight, while her companion was dozing at her side. Neither of them had to fear interruption, since Master Charles was gone for that day and the next, to be present at an inspection of the county fencibles.
“What is your will, miss?” returned Miss Kingscote curtly, not propitiated by having her sleep broken in upon.
“I have to say to you, that I shall take it as a favour if you will call me Mrs. Barlowe in future. Indeed, madam, I have, and had long before I came here, a right to the superior title, which I take blame to myself for not having confided to you. But I am one of those unfortunate creatures who, with such a ring as this”—and Lady Bell held up the third finger of her left hand, on which she had resumed the wearing of her marriage ring—“have wed slavery and desolation, instead of honour and bounty.”
Miss Kingscote had been still in sheer wonder and consternation far greater than those with which she herself had lately filled Lady Bell.