“Oh, thank you, Jane, but I don’t want looking after,” was the reply, the child’s whole face sparkling with pleasure. “I never was so happy in my life.”
“But you may dance too much. Where is Miss Lethwait?”
“Oh, I have not seen her for this long while. I think she is with papa in his smoking room.”
“With papa in his smoking-room!” echoed Jane.
“Well, I saw her there once: we have had three dances since that. She was filling papa’s pipe for him!”
“Lucy!”
“It is true, Jane. Papa was cross; saying that it was a shame that he could not smoke his pipe because the house was full, and Miss Lethwait said, ‘You shall smoke it, dear Lord Oakburn, and I’ll keep the door;” and she took off her gloves and began to fill it. I came away then.”
Jane’s brow darkened. “Had you gone into the room with Miss Lethwait?”
“No; I was running about from one room to another, and I ran in there and saw them talking. Jane! Jane! please don’t keep me! They are going to begin another dance, and I am engaged for it.”
The room called Lord Oakburn’s smoking-room was a small den at the end of a passage. Not of much account as to size or anything else, but Jane had deemed it might be found useful for the night, and it had been converted into a reception-room. In it stood the governess, Miss Lethwait. She looked magnificent. Of that remarkably pale complexion which lights up so well, her eyes sparkling, her beautiful hair shining with a gloss purple as the raven’s wing, the plainness of her features—and they were plain—was this night eclipsed. She wore a low white evening dress trimmed with scarlet, showing to the best advantage her white neck, her falling shoulders, her rounded arms. Never had she appeared to so great advantage: take her as a whole, there was not one form in the room could vie with hers: she looked made to adorn a coronet—and perhaps she was thinking so.
Perhaps some one else was thinking so. One who could think, so far as that opinion went, to more purpose than Miss Lethwait could—the Earl of Oakburn. The rough old tar stood near her, and his eyes ranged over her with much admiration. He had not lost his liking for a fine woman, although he was verging on his sixtieth year. The smoking interlude was over. Lord Oakburn had enjoyed his pipe, and Miss Lethwait had obligingly kept the door against intruders.
Was Miss Lethwait laying herself out to entrap the unwary? Had she been doing it all along, ever since her entrance into that house? It was a question that she never afterwards could come to any satisfactory conclusion upon. Certainly the tempting bait had been ever before her mind’s eye, constantly floating in her brain; but she was of sufficiently honourable nature, and to lay herself deliberately out to allure Lord Oakburn was what she had believed herself hitherto to be wholly incapable of doing. Had she seen another guilty of such conduct, her worst scorn would have been cast on the offender, And yet—was she not, on this night, working on for it? It is true she did not lure him on by will or look; but she did stand there knowing that the peer’s admiring eyes were bent upon her. She remained in that room with him, conscious that she had no business in it; feeling that it was not honourable to Lady Jane to be there, who naturally supposed her to be mixing with the company and giving an eye to Lucy; she had taken upon herself to indulge him in his longing for his pipe; had filled it for him; had stayed in the fumes of the smoke while he finished it. In after life Miss Lethwait never quite reconciled that night with her conscience.
“Do you admire all this hubbub and whirl?” suddenly asked the earl.
“No, Lord Oakburn. It dazzles my sight and takes my breath away. But then I am unused to it.”
“By Jove! I’d sooner be in a hurricane, rounding the North Pole. I told Jane it would take us out of our soundings to have this crowd here, but she kept bothering about the ‘claims of Society.’ I’m sure society may be smothered for all the claim it has upon me!”
“The best society is that of our own fireside—those of us who have firesides to enjoy,” returned Miss Lethwait.
“We have all got as much as that, I suppose,” said the earl.
“Ah, no, Lord Oakburn! Not all. It is not my fortune to have one; and perhaps never will be. But I must not be envious of those who have.”
She stood right under the gas chandelier, underneath its glittering drops; her head was raised to its own lofty height, but the eyelids drooped until the dark lashes rested on the cheeks, lashes that were moist with tears. She held a sprig of geranium in her white gloves, and her fingers were busy, slowly pulling it to pieces, leaf by leaf, petal from petal.
“And why should you not have a fireside?” bluntly asked Lord Oakburn, his sight not losing a single tear, a single movement of the