A shudder quivered through her. "I don't know what I shall do on Monday," she said, in a low, strained voice, and ran out of the room and up-stairs without another thought of Sir Geoffrey.
He waited for a few minutes, in hopes of her return, and then went down and let himself out into the moonlit street.
CHAPTER XI
THE MORROW'S WAKENING
Before Sunday evening, Peggie really lost patience with Prue. She was so saucy and coquettish, so bubbling over with merry stories and foolish jests, that even in church she could not keep still, but fluttered her fan and whispered behind it to Peggie, until that lively damsel was quite ashamed of her levity. Not one word could she be induced to say about Robin. Astonished at her indifference, Peggie tried in a variety of ways to entrap her into some expression of feeling about him, but she became impatient under questions, and received any suggestions of sympathy with cold flippancy or even more provoking silence.
All the afternoon, a stream of visitors poured through the little house in Mayfair. Superb equipages and sumptuous sedan-chairs blocked the thoroughfare, while their occupants, in gorgeous array, offered their congratulations to the Lady Prudence, and sipped weak tea and chocolate out of her grandmother's egg-shell "chaney" cups. Lady Drumloch did not venture into such a crowd, but, decked in her priceless cashmeres and laces, received a favored few in her dressing-room, and listened with a flush of pride on her pale face to the praises of Prue's beauty and the prognostications of a future even more brilliant and eventful than her past.
"You must persuade her to marry well and settle down, dear cousin," Lady Limerick advised. "Twenty-two is quite old enough, even for a widow, to give up frivolous flirtations and choose a husband. The men are all wild about her, I know; but if she jilts a few more of them, the rest will get frightened and leave her in the lurch, and she will have to be satisfied with a crooked stick, like many another spoilt beauty."
"She must please herself," Lady Drumloch replied. "The harder she finds it to choose before marriage, the less likely she will be to repent afterward."
For all that the old lady took occasion to read her granddaughter a sharp lecture upon the necessity of mending her ways before too late. To which, Prue listened reverentially, and promised speedy amendment. Five minutes afterward, in the privacy of their own room, she was making Peggie die of laughter at her caricature of herself as a reformed character, with all her fascinating caprices exchanged for the cares of the nursery and still-room, obedience to a tyrannical spouse replacing her sway over a score of suitors, while she wielded Mrs. Grundy's birch instead of defying it. Not one solemn or repentant thought clouded the laughter of her blue eyes, and when her cousin kissed her good night and bade her sleep well, she cried out:
"Why, I'm two-thirds asleep already," and turned upon her pillow with a sigh of voluptuous drowsiness.