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Her throat was dry, her heart was beating painfully, she knew Roxmouth's crafty and treacherous nature, and her whole soul sickened as she realised that now he could, if he chose, drag the name of John Walden through a mire of social mud, and hold it up to ridicule among his own particular 'set, who would certainly lose no time in blackening it with their ever-ready tar-brush.
He knew perfectly well, because he had consented to it, that his house had only been 'used' for Roxmouth's purposes, and that he, personally, was of no more consideration to a man like the future Duke of Ormistoune than a landlord for the time being, whose little reckoning for entertainment would in due course be settled in some polite and ceremonious fashion.
Even Roxmouth's tongue must stop calumniating me, for though many people are very heartless, they do draw the line at slandering a crippled woman! It's all for the best, I'm sure it's all for the best!"
Spruce, thinking she was feverish, had given her a glass of 'cooling cordial' made of fruit and ice and lemon water, which she was enjoying at intervals while criticising the fine folks in the dining-room. "Well done, Maryllia!" she murmured, as she saw her friend enter on Roxmouth's arm "Cold as a ray of the moon, but doing her social duty to the bitter end!
Her sensitive nature was keenly alive to every slight impression of kindness or of coldness; and the intense longing for love, which had been the pulse of her inmost being since her earliest infancy, and which had filled her with such passionate devotion to her father that her grief at his loss had been almost abnormally profound and despairing, made her feel poignantly every little incident which emphasised, or seemed to emphasise, her own utter loneliness in the world; and she was just now strung up to such a nervous tension, that she would almost have consented to wed Lord Roxmouth if by so doing she could have saved any possible mischief occurring to John Walden through Roxmouth's malignancy.
And gradually it dawned upon him that Maryllia had possibly nay very probably gone away for his sake, to make things easier for him to remove her presence altogether from his vicinity-and so render Roxmouth's tale-bearing, with its consequent malicious gossip, futile, till of itself it died away and was forgotten.
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