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The medical practitioner quite refused to accept the unhappy Selina's theory that her revelation had in any way induced Clark's sudden collapse. Both he and the coroner afterwards, who found the immediate cause to be heart-failure, held that such a supposition was unwarranted by facts.
She lightly mentioned the names of four or five distinguished guests, including the Conservative Premier of the day. Wharton made her a little ceremonious bow. "I shall be delighted. Can you trust me to behave?" Lady Selina's smile made her his match for the moment. "Oh! we can defend ourselves!" she said. "By the way I think you told me that Mr. Raeburn was not a friend of yours."
But I always said to her: 'Selina's a girl who can take care of herself, and sure enough she'll turn up all right one of these fine days. It was very wrong of her, though, not to let us have a line from her for nigh on six years. But I fancy she was always a bit ashamed of us. Her notions were always so grand, and plain, hard-working people weren't good enough for her.
Who would have thought, for instance, on that wretched night when Mr. Ascott came to Hilary at Kensington, or on that dreary heartless wedding-day, that they should ever have been sitting in Selina's room so merry and comfortable, admiring the baby, and on the friendliest terms with baby's papa?
He stepped over the pail towards the bureau and, catching the girl's eye as she looked up, turned the key noisily in the lock and placed it ostentatiously in his pocket. A sudden vivid change in Selina's complexion satisfied him that his manoeuvre had been appreciated. "Are you afraid I shall steal anything?" she demanded, hotly, as he regained the kitchen. The captain quailed.
One was for Trina, in Selina's "elegant" handwriting; another was an advertisement of a new kind of operating chair for dentists; the third was a card from a milliner on the next block, announcing an opening; and the fourth, contained in the fat oblong envelope, was a printed form with blanks left for names and dates, and addressed to McTeague, from an office in the City Hall.
'Perhaps you won't have time to take me to Aunt Selina's! exclaimed Jimmy. 'What do you suppose I am to do with you then? she asked. 'I don't know, he said; 'only I don't want to go there! 'I am sure I don't want to have to take you there, was the answer, as the cab passed Hyde Park.
Above the straight line of the roofs the deep blue of a cloudless sky stretched from side to side. Lords and ladies thronged the foreground, while on a dais in the centre a gallant gentleman, just alighted off his horse, stooped to the fingers of a girl as bravely dressed out as Selina's lady between the saints; and round about stood venerable personages, robed in the most variegated clothing.
Her appearance, as she stood under the flood of sharp words poured out upon her, was absolutely repulsive. Even Miss Hilary turned away, and began to think it would have been easier to teach all day and do house work half the night, than have the infliction of a servant to say nothing of the disgrace of seeing Selina's "peculiarities" so exposed before a stranger.
There was a ghastly light trembling over it; like nothing that I have ever seen by day; like nothing that I have ever seen by night. I dimly discerned Selina's bed, and the frame of the window, and the curtains on either side of it but not the starlight, and not the shadowy tops of the trees in the garden. The light grew fainter and fainter; the objects in the room faded slowly away.
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