“O Vera, how could you?” began her aunt at once. “Or if you wanted to do it, why did you drag us all in this terrible way? This is something much more dreadful than walking in processions and being arrested; this is the most dreadful thing that you’ve done yet.”
“The worst of it is,” said the captain, “that it breaks down all the sense of noblesse oblige and entre nous—all that kind of thing, you know. If it were anybody else, it wouldn’t so much matter, for we seem to be baited from every side just now; but I don’t think that she ought to join in, and what worries me especially is that their being sold out at Paddington shows that the magazine has gone out on the afternoon trains in every direction.” He drew a hard breath and glared. Just to look at him, any casual observer would have declared on the Bible that here was a man with great force of character.
“The Paddington trains go only as far as Oxford,” said Lady Verita in a soothing tone, but Captain Adair was clearly in no easily soothed mood.
“They go to Reading, too,” he said with an uncommon air of real opposition, “and to Banbury.”
“And to Stratford—they go to Stratford, too,” interposed the dowager marchioness. “Oh, I’m sure, if you looked into the matter, you’d find that quite a number of places are reached from Paddington. Else why shouldn’t those trains have gone from some other station?” She paused at this bit of constructive London logic, and reverted to her usual condition.
“I wish that they did go from some other station,” said Captain Adair, irately, “it took me so long to get to Paddington. To-day was the first time in ages that I’d gone there, and I wouldn’t have gone there to-day only I was right in the neighborhood.”
Lady Verita looked at him in a way that she had, and he ceased speaking. There was no special quality in her glance, but it was of a kind that one frequently encounters in the best English circles, and it always causes some one to cease speaking. Captain Adair would become a duke some day if one man should die and another should never marry; but it must be confessed that Lady Verita, whether she did or did not have his interest at heart, frequently chose that he should cease speaking.
“I wish that you hadn’t put your name to it,” said the dowager marchioness, suddenly awakened to life and their family grievance by the duchess’s turning a page with a smart snap; “there’s a place there where a man shrieks that he will fight until not one drop of blue blood is left running beside another. That is really very terrible, my dear, that”—She was stopped abruptly, for the duchess threw the book violently from her, gathered up her feather boa, and, rising abruptly, started toward the door.
“What is it?” asked Lady Verita, rising also.
Without a word of explanation or adieu, her grace sailed out of the room. Captain Adair having jumped to open the door for her.