'I can--and grateful,' she answered. 'In proof of which I am going to make a strange request, Sir George. Do not misunderstand it. And yet--it is only that before you leave here--whatever be the circumstances under which you leave--you will see me for five minutes.'
Sir George stared, bowed, and muttered 'Too happy.' Then observing, or fancying he observed, that she was anxious to be rid of him, he took his leave and went into the house.
For a man who had descended the stairs an hour before, hipped to the last degree, with his mind on a pistol, it must be confessed that he went up with a light step; albeit, in a mighty obfuscation, as Dr. Johnson might have put it. A kinder smile, more honest eyes he swore he had never seen, even in a plain face. Her very blushes, of which the memory set his blasé blood dancing to a faster time, were a character in themselves. But--he wondered. She had made such advances, been so friendly, dropped such hints--he wondered. He was fresh from the masquerades, from Mrs. Cornely's assemblies, Lord March's converse, the Chudleigh's fantasies; the girl had made an appointment--he wondered.
For all that, one thing was unmistakable. Life, as he went up the stairs, had taken on another and a brighter colour; was fuller, brisker, more generous. From a spare garret with one poor casement it had grown in an hour into a palace, vague indeed, but full of rich vistas and rosy distances and quivering delights. The corridor upstairs, which at his going out had filled him with distaste--there were boots in it, and water-cans--was now the Passage Beautiful; for he might meet her there. The day which, when he rose, had lain before him dull and monotonous--since Lord Chatham was too ill to see him, and he had no one with whom to game--was now full-furnished with interest, and hung with recollections--recollections of conscious eyes and the sweetest lips in the world. In a word, Julia had succeeded in that which she had set herself to do. Sir George might wonder. He was none the less in love.
CHAPTER XIII
A SPOILED CHILD
Julia was right in fancying that she saw Lady Dunborough's face at one of the windows in the south-east corner of the house. Those windows commanded both the Marlborough High Street and the Salisbury road, welcomed alike the London and the Salisbury coach, overlooked the loungers at the entrance to the town, and supervised most details of the incoming and outgoing worlds. Lady Dunborough had not been up and about half-an-hour before she remarked these advantages. In an hour her ladyship was installed in that suite, which, though in the east wing, was commonly reckoned to be one of the best in the house. Heaven knows how she did it. There is a pertinacity, shameless and violent, which gains its ends, be the crowd between never so dense. It is possible that Mr. Smith would have ousted her had he dared. It is possible he had to pay forfeit to the rightful tenants, and in private cursed her for an old jade and a brimstone. But when a viscountess sits herself down in the middle of a room and declines to budge, she cannot with decency be taken up like a sack of hops and dumped in the passage.
Her ladyship, therefore, won, and had the pleasure of viewing from the coveted window the scene between Julia and Sir George; a scene which gave her the profoundest satisfaction. What she could not see--her eyes were no longer all that they had been--she imagined. In five minutes she had torn up the last rag of the girl's character, and proved her as bad as the worst woman that ever rode down Cheapside in a cart. Lady Dunborough was not mealy-mouthed, nor one of those who mince matters.
'What did I tell you?' she cried. 'She will be on with that stuck-up before night, and be gone with morning. If Dunborough comes back he may whistle for her!'