"Ah!" said Lady Dacre. It seemed to her that she understood how troublesome Colonel Archdale's conscience must be to him in this matter. But the Colonel was a stranger to her, and at times Lady Dacre was severe in her judgments. Sir Temple declared that she never had any scruples over that second line of the famous poem of aversion,
"I do not like you. Dr. Fell."
"There is something I want to tell you," she said after a pause, "something about Sir Temple and myself." And her listener received the confidence that had been withheld from Stephen a few evenings before in the garden.
Lady Dacre had scarcely finished when there came the sound of feet on the stairs, a blonde head appeared in the narrow opening, another head of dull brown hair came close behind, and Gerald Edmonson, followed by Lord Bulchester, stepped into the cupola. Lady Dacre remembered at the moment what Archdale had said on the journey, that most peoples' shadows changed about,—now before, now on one side or the other, but Edmonson's always went straight behind him.
"May we come?" asked the foremost young man, bowing to each of the ladies.
"It is rather late to ask that," returned Madam Archdale, "but as you are here, we will try to make you welcome."
And they sat there talking until the sun grew too hot for them.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Royal, the subject of Lady Dacre's curiosity, was thinking of the visit she was on her way to make which would bring her within a few miles of Seascape. She dreaded it, yet she knew that her father was right when he told her that the more she could appear to treat the question of this marriage as a jest,—a thing which meant nothing to her,—the wiser she would be. This was the course that by her father's advice she had marked out for herself. Elizabeth Royal had her faults; she sometimes tried her friends a good deal by them; but if she had been Lot's wife, and had gone out of Sodom with him, she would never have been left on the plain as a bitter warning against vacillation. Only, it seemed to her a very long time since her restful days had gone by, and she realized that the one course she hated was to do things because it was good policy to do them. Before Archdale she was brave; not only from pride, but out of pity to him; before others, all but her father, pride restrained her from complaint, even from admission of the possibility of the disaster she feared. But alone her courage often ebbed.