She waited a moment to allow the earl to fill the gap, but he did not. He was watching her intently.
“I came down here with my husband,” she continued at length, with an air of embroidering the interval; “he didn’t want me to come in to—to bother you, but I felt I must. I don’t want you to fall out with him; you haven’t had him back so long, I know; it seems pretty rough on you every way; but if you can’t take us both on, I’ll go. Of course I can’t go for good, but it’ll seem good enough, I dare say; I can keep out of the way, and you can have him to yourself; and you won’t have to apologize to all your friends for his making a fool of himself.”
There was some gentle irony in her voice, and it wavered as she concluded:
“I’ve been pretty lonely before, but it was never anything like this; and if I’d known how bad you’d take me I’d have stayed so.”
Her nervousness and her desire for simple expression soaked her speech in a kind of sweetened slanginess, from which, usually, she was able to wring out her thoughts into very clean English. Slang was, in fact, the charcoal outline of most of her talk, but it was generally concealed by the color. The latter she supplied on this occasion in person. She was a very pretty woman, and seemed able to look her prettiest at will; the need for beauty painting it freshly on her face. She had the dancer’s trick, too, of seeming to float above her anchored feet, like a butterfly with folded wings.
There were tears in her eyes, which aided the apparent sincerity in her tone, though, indeed, she was sufficiently sorry for the silent man before her to make it a very solid counterfeit of the fact; but the tears were come of disappointment and hurt pride.
However, to a man, the tear in a woman’s eye is always a tear, a salt tear; and in such eyes they looked well enough, and ill enough, to warm a colder heart than was in Lord Veynes’ father; for age is tenderer to beauty than youth, being a wayfarer among flowers which the other wears; besides, it sees at sundown, and lips seem redder and eyelids sadder when they face the sunset.
Lord Egham made a step forward, and offered her a seat. And Rosamond murmured to herself: “I’ve come to stay!”