The Dean's wife sprang to her feet in despair. In general, it was to her a matter for fond complacency that her husband had no memory for gossip, and was in such matters as innocent and as dangerous as a child. But this was too much! At the same moment Ashe came quickly forward.
"My sister?" said Kitty,—"my sister?"
She spoke low and uncertainly, her eyes fixed upon the Dean.
He looked at her with a sudden odd sense of something unusual, then went on, still floundering:
"We met her at St. Pancras on our way down. If I had only known we were to have had the pleasure of meeting you—Do you know, I think she is looking decidedly better?"
His kindly expression as he rose expected a word of sisterly assent. Meanwhile, even Lady Grosville was paralyzed, and the words with which she had meant to interpose failed on her lips.
Kitty, too, rose, looking round for something, which she seemed to find in the face of William Ashe, for her eyes clung there.
"My sister," she repeated, in the same low, strained voice,—"my sister Alice? I—I don't know. I have never seen her."
Ashe could not remember afterwards precisely how the incident closed. There was a bustle of departing guests, and from the midst of it Lady Kitty slipped away. But as he came down-stairs in smoking trim, ten minutes later, he overheard the injured Dean wrestling with his wife, as she lit a candle for him on the landing:
"My dear! what did you look at me like that for? What did the child mean? and what on earth is the matter!"
CHAPTER IV
AFTER the ladies had gone to bed, on the night of Lady Kitty's recitation, William Ashe stayed up till past midnight talking with old Lord Grosville. When relieved of the presence of his womenkind, who were apt either to oppress him, in the person of his wife, or to puzzle him, in the person of his daughters, Lord Grosville was not by any means without value as a talker. He possessed that narrow but still most serviceable fund of human experience which the English landowner, while our English tradition subsists, can hardly escape, if he will. As guardsman, volunteer, magistrate, lord lieutenant, member—for the sake of his name and his acres—of various important commissions, as military attaché, even, for a short space, to an important embassy, he had acquired, by mere living, that for which his intellectual betters had often envied him,—a certain shrewdness, a certain instinct, as to both men and affairs, which were often of more service to him than finer brains to other persons. But like most accomplishments, these also brought their own conceit with them. Lord Grosville having, in his own opinion, done extremely well without much book education himself, had but little appreciation for it in others.
Nevertheless, he rarely missed a chance of conversation with William Ashe, not because the younger man, in spite of his past indolence, was generally held to be both able and accomplished, but because the elder found in him an invincible taste for men and women, their fortunes, oddities, catastrophes,—especially the last,—similar to his own.
Like Mary Lyster, both were good gossips; but of a much more disinterested type than she. Women, indeed, as gossips are too apt to pursue either the damnation of some one else or the apotheosis of themselves. But here the stupider no less than the abler man showed a certain broad detachment not very common in women,—amused by the human comedy itself, making no profit out of it, either for themselves or morals, but asking only that the play should go on.
The incident, or rather the heroine, of the evening had given Lord Grosville a topic which, in the case of William Ashe, he saw no reason for avoiding; and in the peace of the smoking-room, when he was no longer either hungry for his dinner or worried by his responsibilities as host, he fell upon his wife's family, and, as though he had been the manager of a puppet-show, unpacked the whole box of them for Ashe's entertainment.
Figure after figure emerged, one more besmirched than another, till finally the most beflecked of all was shaken out and
