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Then she envied Fan her beautiful watch and chain, the half-score of rings, bangles, and brooches which Miss Starbrow had given her; and this reminded her of an ornament she possessed, an old-fashioned gold brooch with an amethyst in it, and which in the pride of philosophy she had looked on with a good deal of contempt. Now the rose was flung away, and the despised jewel put in its place.
"Oh, Mary, will you not shake hands with me before I go?" Miss Starbrow moved back a step or two and stared deliberately at her face, as if amazed and angered beyond measure at her persistence.
Her husband himself had given her that suspicion by the disparaging way he had invariably spoken of her, and his desire to know everything that Fan had said about her. That Fan had never told her anything was no proof that there was nothing to tell, since the girl was strangely close about some things. "Yes," returned Miss Starbrow, noting and perhaps rightly interpreting the other's look.
Try once more, but not so fast and a little louder." The good-humoured tone in which she spoke served to reassure Fan; and knowing that she could do better, and getting over her nervousness, she began again, and this time Miss Starbrow let her finish the page. "You can read, I find. Better, I think, than any of the maids I have had.
When Miss Starbrow, in a fit of anger, had dismissed her maid some months before, and then had accepted some little personal assistance in dressing for the play, and at other times, from her housemaid, Rosie at once imagined that she was winning her way to her mistress's heart, and her silly dream was that she would eventually get promoted to the vacant and desirable place of lady's-maid.
But Miss Starbrow was not willing to let him depart before giving him another taste of her resentment. "Did you imagine, sir, that your presence could be anything but obnoxious to me?" she retorted. "Did you think I had forgotten?" "No, not that," he replied. "What then?" came the quick answer, the sharp tone cutting the senses like a lash.
Fan, afraid to cry out, struggled vainly to get free; he held her firmly and closely, and had just put his lips to her face when the door swung open, and Miss Starbrow sailed like a tragedy-queen into the room, her head thrown back, her face white as marble and her eyes gleaming.
But she would not allow her walks with Fan to interfere with the latter's visits to Miss Starbrow. "She must be more to you than I can ever be," she would insist. "Well, dear, she cannot be less, and while she and you are in town it is only natural that you should be glad to see each other every day." And so after a walk in the morning she would persuade Fan to go later in the day to Dawson Place.
She concluded that it was for Fan, and that Miss Starbrow wished to wait or leave some message for her. In the sitting- room they met, Constance slightly nervous and looking pale in her mourning, and regarded each other with no little curiosity. "I am sorry Fan is out," said Constance, "but if you do not mind waiting for her she will perhaps come in soon."
Merton Chance, clerk in the Foreign Office, and supposed by his friends to be extremely talented. He was rather slight but well-formed, a little under the medium height, clean shaved, handsome, colourless as marble, with black hair and dark blue eyes that looked black. Miss Starbrow, who had left the room a few minutes before, came in, and standing by the table listened to the curate.
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