FullReads

The dog, which had never liked my lady, showed his teeth with a suppressed growl.

“Send that horrid animal away, Alicia,” Lady Audley said, impatiently. “The brute knows that I am frightened of him, and takes advantage of my terror. And yet they call the creatures generous and noble-hearted! Bah, Caesar! I hate you, and you hate me; and if you met me in the dark in some narrow passage you would fly at my throat and strangle me, wouldn’t you?”

My lady, safely sheltered behind her step-daughter, shook her yellow curls at the angry animal, and defied him maliciously.

“Do you know, Lady Audley, that Mr. Talboys, the young widower, has been here asking for Sir Michael and you?”

Lucy Audley lifted her penciled eyebrows. “I thought they were coming to dinner,” she said. “Surely we shall have enough of them then.”

She had a heap of wild autumn flowers in the skirt of her muslin dress. She had come through the fields at the back of the Court, gathering the hedge-row blossoms in her way. She ran lightly up the broad staircase to her own rooms. George’s glove lay on her boudoir table. Lady Audley rung the bell violently, and it was answered by Phoebe Marks. “Take that litter away,” she said, sharply. The girl collected the glove and a few withered flowers and torn papers lying on the table into her apron.

“What have you been doing all this morning?” asked my lady. “Not wasting your time, I hope?”

“No, my lady, I have been altering the blue dress. It is rather dark on this side of the house, so I took it up to my own room, and worked at the window.”

The girl was leaving the room as she spoke, but she turned around and looked at Lady Audley as if waiting for further orders.

Lucy looked up at the same moment, and the eyes of the two women met.

“Phoebe Marks,” said my lady, throwing herself into an easy-chair, and trifling with the wild flowers in her lap, “you are a good, industrious girl, and while I live and am prosperous, you shall never want a firm friend or a twenty-pound note.”

CHAPTER X

MISSING

When Robert Audley awoke he was surprised to see the fishing-rod lying on the bank, the line trailing idly in the water, and the float bobbing harmlessly up and down in the afternoon sunshine. The young barrister was a long time stretching his arms and legs in various directions to convince himself, by means of such exercise, that he still retained the proper use of those members; then, with a mighty effort, he contrived to rise from the grass, and having deliberately folded his railway rug into a convenient shape for carrying over his shoulder, he strolled away to look for George Talboys.

Once or twice he gave a sleepy shout, scarcely loud enough to scare the birds in the branches above his head, or the trout in the stream at his feet: but receiving no answer, grew tired of the exertion, and dawdled on, yawning as he went, and still looking for George Talboys.

By-and-by he took out his watch, and was surprised to find that it was a quarter past four.

“Why, the selfish beggar must have gone home to his dinner!” he muttered, reflectively; “and yet that isn’t much like him, for he seldom remembers even his meals unless I jog his memory.”

Even a good appetite, and the knowledge that his dinner would very likely suffer by this delay, could not quicken Mr. Robert Audley’s constitutional dawdle, and by the time he strolled in at the front door of the Sun, the clocks were striking five. He so fully expected to find George Talboys waiting for him in the little sitting-room, that the absence of that gentleman seemed to give the apartment a dreary look, and Robert groaned aloud.

“This is lively!” he said. “A cold dinner, and nobody to eat it with!”

The landlord of the Sun came himself to apologize for his ruined dishes.