“To-morrow,” Egidia continued, with a little imperceptible shudder, “you must go over it all again to me. After you have had a night’s rest, you will be able to think and marshall your facts more clearly. I ought to know exactly where we stand. Meantime, will you send for your things from the Great Northern Hotel and pay your bill?”
“But I must live somewhere!” exclaimed the other in a sick fright. “You surely don’t want me to go back to Mortimer, when I have just run away from him?”
“No, but you must write to him, and tell him you are staying here with me. Though literary, I am supposed to be respectable.” She smiled. She had taken her line. “And, by the way, I have a dinner party here to-night, and I want you to enjoy it and look nice.”
“I have an evening dress in my box at the Hotel,” said Mrs. Elles, eagerly.
“Well, then, we will get it here in time for you. I will send at once.”
She rang the bell, gave her orders, and then turning, stopped and kissed the little bit of thistledown who stood there, grateful and apprehensive. It was an effort, the whole scene had been one long effort, but she flattered herself she had come out of it well, and had not betrayed herself. In the exercise of her profession she had studied the feelings of others and their development and outward manifestations so closely that she had grown almost morbidly desirous of not showing her own.
“Please call me Phœbe!” her visitor had murmured as she led her to her room and left her there.
Yes, she, a simple, honest, unsophisticated woman, would do anything, dare, contrive, and practise anything that might deliver Edmund Rivers from the consequences of his accidental connection with this miracle of indiscretion, this butterfly, who, unfortunately for others, took herself so seriously.
He should not, if she could help it, have to rue the day when he had allowed the human interest to come into his life, and occupy even a portion of his mental foreground. That was all he had done; he had never flirted with her, Egidia felt sure. “Love plays the deuce with landscape!” he had once laughingly proclaimed, to excuse himself from marrying. No, he should not be forced, by the stain of the courts, the horrors of imputation, to take on himself the shackles of the marriage tie, with which the little woman who had played the part of his evil genius, would so carelessly invest him!
. . . . . . . .