John Gore, feeling in his pocket for his father’s letter, could not help being struck by the haggard expression of my lady’s face. So ripe and healthy by nature, the change in her was the more obvious and the more marked. The woman looked ill, with an indefinable grayness about the mouth and a heaviness about the eyes. Wrinkles had appeared in the skin that she had not touched that morning with rouge and powder, making her look thin, yellow, and even old.
“I have a letter for you from my father.”
“For me?”
Her face lighted up instantly, yet John Gore was struck by a shallow gleam like fear in her eyes.
“He has gone into the country for a few days.”
“The country! Where?—what part?”
“Suffolk, I believe.”
He handed her the letter, and turned to the window as though to give her leisure to break the seal and read it. Yet for nearly half a minute she suffered the letter to lie unopened upon her lap as though she were afraid to dip into its contents. Her eyes had fixed themselves with a look of prophetic dread upon the Spaniard’s picture where the sunlight shone.
John Gore, standing at the window, heard the stiff crackle of the paper in her hands as she spread it upon her knee. Stephen Gore and my Lady Purcell had been friends for so many years that the son almost thought of them as brother and sister. His father had been Lionel Purcell’s friend and Barbara’s godfather, and the sympathies of the two families had seemed to flow in one common channel.
“John”—her voice startled him, for his thoughts had flown elsewhere, as a lover’s thoughts will; he turned and saw her sitting with the letter on her lap, her face dead white, and the muscles twitching about her mouth—“will you ring for Jael?”