“Say what you like,” he growled.
She turned again toward the long west wing of the great house, which glowed above the box hedges, warm and red with sunlight above its clinging roses.
Her heart was not so brave as her words, but it carried her past the powdered footman with the air of a duchess, as she gave her name, though she read doubts in his curdling face as to her reception, and shared them herself. But therein she wronged a man too proud to let any woman suffer a slight in his own house; and in due time the heavily curtained library door was opened, and the earl entered and bowed.
“I am Lady Veynes,” said his visitor, quietly. She felt a sudden kindness and pity for the frail, bent old man, who was still as white as his son had reported.
He bowed again.
“I was waiting in the garden when my hus—your son was in here,” she went on, simply; “he came out and told me all about it. I’m very sorry. I mean I’m very sorry it is so bad for you. Your son said you’d wish him better dead. I hope you won’t. He’s an awfully good son; he thinks no end of you; and he’s outside now tremendously cut up.”
Lord Egham made no sign, but he was looking in the woman’s face.
“I’ve never thought about it,” she continued, naïvely, “but I didn’t suppose there was such a difference between people as—as there seems to be. I thought if a man’s wife was pure and true to him, and loved him, he got all his change—I mean all he stood to; isn’t that it? You don’t think so, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything about you, you see,” she explained, with warming sympathy; “you were only the Earl of Something, and it didn’t seem to matter much what an earl felt; he didn’t seem quite human; it really didn’t seem as if he could feel so very much. But you see you do.”
The earl bent his head gravely, but there was the ghost of a smile about his drawn lips.
“Sir,” she said, with a little gesture which opened her arms and seemed pathetically to expose herself, “I am sorry to be here to trouble you; I didn’t come for that. I suppose you think I was very glad to catch your son, and his title, and money, and things; but I wasn’t. I didn’t want them; I don’t know what you do with them; but I wanted to belong somewhere. I’m all by myself, you see,” with a little isolating wave of her hand, “and that’s dreary enough at times, especially for a woman.”