“Yes, my Lady,” said the girl, with her charming smile.
“Come, then, and give me a kiss in return. Do you love me? Very well, then, treat me like your mother. Never mind ‘my lady’ this time. Give me a good hug!”
Something in those homely words, or something perhaps in the look that accompanied them, touched sympathies in Isabel which seldom showed themselves on the surface. Her smiling lips trembled, the bright tears rose in her eyes. “You are too good to me,” she murmured, with her head on Lady Lydiard’s bosom. “How can I ever love you enough in return?”
Lady Lydiard patted the pretty head that rested on her with such filial tenderness. “There! there!” she said, “Go back and play with Tommie, my dear. We may be as fond of each other as we like; but we mustn’t cry. God bless you! Go away—go away!”
She turned aside quickly; her own eyes were moistening, and it was part of her character to be reluctant to let Isabel see it. “Why have I made a fool of myself?” she wondered, as she approached the drawing-room door. “It doesn’t matter. I am all the better for it. Odd, that Mr. Hardyman should have made me feel fonder of Isabel than ever!”
With those reflections she re-entered the drawing-room—and suddenly checked herself with a start. “Good Heavens!” she exclaimed irritably, “how you frightened me! Why was I not told you were here?”
Having left the drawing-room in a state of solitude, Lady Lydiard on her return found herself suddenly confronted with a gentleman, mysteriously planted on the hearth-rug in her absence. The new visitor may be rightly described as a gray man. He had gray hair, eyebrows, and whiskers; he wore a gray coat, waistcoat, and trousers, and gray gloves. For the rest, his appearance was eminently suggestive of wealth and respectability and, in this case, appearances were really to be trusted. The gray man was no other than Lady Lydiard’s legal adviser, Mr. Troy.
“I regret, my Lady, that I should have been so unfortunate as to startle you,” he said, with a certain underlying embarrassment in his manner. “I had the honor of sending word by Mr. Moody that I would call at this hour, on some matters of business connected with your Ladyship’s house property. I presumed that you expected to find me here, waiting your pleasure—”
Thus far Lady Lydiard had listened to her legal adviser, fixing her eyes on his face in her usually frank, straightforward way. She now stopped him in the middle of a sentence, with a change of expression in her own face which was undisguisedly a change to alarm.
“Don’t apologize, Mr. Troy,” she said. “I am to blame for forgetting your appointment and for not keeping my nerves under proper control.” She paused for a moment and took a seat before she said her next words. “May I ask,” she resumed, “if there is something unpleasant in the business that brings you here?”