“Lady Meldrum!” exclaimed Chisholm, pricking up his ears. “Who’s she?”
“Oh, a woman who has rather come to the front of late—wife of old Sir Henry Meldrum, the great Glasgow ironrnaster. We were driving past, and I wanted to see you, so she came in with me, rather than wait in the cold. Quite a smart woman—you ought to know her.”
“Thanks,” responded the Under-Secretary coldly. “I have no desire to have that pleasure. Smart women don’t interest me in the least.”
“That is meant, I suppose, as a compliment,” she observed. “You are certainly in a very delightful mood to-day, Dudley.”
“I have at least spoken the truth,” he said, piqued by the knowledge that for some mysterious reason this woman was conniving with a new star in the social firmament, Lady Meldrum, wife of his pet abomination, a Jubilee knight, to effect his marriage with the unknown Muriel—her daughter, of course.
“You have unearthed and placed before me all the most ugly phases of my career,” cried the unhappy woman with a quick, defiant glance; “and now, after your flood of reproaches, you declare that in future we are to be as strangers.”
“For the sake of our reputations.”
“Our reputations? Rubbish!” she laughed cynically. “What reputation has either of us to lose?” He bit his lip. A hasty retort arose within him, but he succeeded in stifling it.
“We need not, I think, discuss that point,” he said very coldly.
She stood in silence waiting for him to proceed.