Page:The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/151

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LORD BEAUPRÉ
141

every one knew it, and judged by this standard Lord Beaupré made no show; how otherwise should he have achieved that sweet accompanied ramble? Everything, at any rate, was lucid now, except, perhaps, a certain ambiguity in Hugh Gosselin, who, on coming into the drawing-room with his mother, had looked flushed and grave, and had stayed only long enough to kiss Mary and go out again. There had been nothing effusive in the scene; but then there was nothing effusive in any English scene. This helped to explain why Miss Gosselin had been so blank during the minutes she spent with him before her mother came back. He himself wanted to cultivate tranquillity, and he felt that he did so the next day in not going again to Chester Street. He went instead to the British Museum, where he sat quite like an elderly gentleman, with his hands crossed on the top of his stick and his eyes fixed on an Assyrian bull. When he came away, however, it was with the resolution to move briskly; so that he walked westward the whole length of Oxford Street and arrived at the Marble Arch. He