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Updated: May 1, 2025
He was very ill indeed, and the doctors hardly thought he could live. I was so sorry for him that I felt that if he died even the happiness of my meeting with my lover would be clouded over. I longed for news of him, but it was not very easy to obtain it, since the infection kept every one away. But one day I was walking when I met Lady Ardaragh driving in her little phaeton.
I guessed that the most likely place to find Lady Ardaragh would be the little inner drawing-room of which she had made a boudoir, to which were admitted only her favoured and intimate visitors. I went through the house without meeting any one. There was not a sound.
I had not yet seen Richard Dawson; and as my eye went from one to the other of the gentlemen without seeing him, I began to be almost hopeful that he was not there. Sir Arthur Ardaragh was talking to my grandmother and to Mrs. Dawson, who plainly was too much absorbed by the anxieties of the occasion to hear much of what he was saying.
"Would you believe it, Miss Devereux, that she thought I cared more for my books than for her? As though anything could give me consolation without her!" Then Lady Ardaragh cried out that they were a pair of egotists and pulled me down to kiss her, saying that she wished me joy, for every one knew by this time that Anthony Cardew was my lover and was coming home to me.
As we jogged along in the evening coolness and sweetness, we came upon Sir Arthur Ardaragh with little Robin on his shoulder. The boy shouted with joy when he saw me; and when I had stopped the phaeton he called down from his height about the picnic tea father and he had had in the fields, his little fat hand upon his father's neck while he told it.
Dawson dropped off to sleep, and the party at the end of the room was playing some noisy round game in which Lady Ardaragh had joined, and Sir Arthur had taken her place beside Gran and they were talking together. "Mr. Dawson," I said suddenly, "there is something I should like to say to you." "What is it?" "Something I should like to ask you."
For a moment I did not see Lady Ardaragh anywhere, but presently her uplifted voice told me where she was, and looking down I caught a glimpse of her pretty shoulders showing rosily out of a pale green frock. She was talking to some one; I could not see who it was for the moment.
I did not drink wine my grandmother did not consider it becoming in a girl and it seemed the hardest thing in the world to procure a glass of water, judging by the delay in bringing it when I asked for it. Lady Ardaragh sat nearly opposite to us. I noticed that she was very flushed and her eyes bright, and that she chattered and laughed a great deal.
When we had returned to the drawing-room the smart London ladies flocked together in a bevy and began chattering like a field of starlings. Their talk seemed to be altogether of their male acquaintances, whom they called by their names Jack and Tom and Reggie and Algy, and so on. Lady Ardaragh sat down by my grandmother and talked to her in a low voice.
And there is your dear boy." Lady Ardaragh frowned. "Sir Arthur never knows how I look, what I put on," she said. "He was an ardent lover enough, but now I do not think I could provoke him if I tried. He simply does not think of me. An illuminated manuscript is more to him than I am; and he would rather have a black-letter book than my youth.
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