“My poor John!” she said, bending her beautiful head and resting her burning forehead upon his hand; “how tired you must have been, to sleep so soundly in the middle of the day! I have been awake for nearly an hour, watching you—”
“Watching me, Lolly!—why?”
“And thinking how good you are to me. Oh, John, John! what can I ever do—what can I ever do to atone to you for all—”
“Be happy, Aurora,” he said huskily, “be happy, and—and send that man away.”
“I will, John; he shall go soon, dear—tonight!”
“What!—then that letter was to dismiss him?” asked Mr. Mellish.
“You know that I wrote to him?”
“Yes, darling, it was to dismiss him—say that it was so, Aurora. Pay him what money you like to keep the secret that he discovered, but send him away, Lolly, send him away. The sight of him is hateful to me. Dismiss him, Aurora, or I must do so myself.”
He rose in his passionate excitement, but Aurora laid her hand softly upon his arm.
“Leave all to me,” she said quietly. “Believe me that I will act for the best. For the best, at least, if you couldn’t bear to lose me; and you couldn’t bear that, could you, John?”
“Lose you! My God, Aurora! why do you say such things to me? I wouldn’t lose you. Do you hear, Lolly? I wouldn’t. I’d follow you to the farthest end of the universe, and Heaven take pity upon those that came between us!”
His set teeth, the fierce light in his eyes, and the iron rigidity of his mouth, gave an emphasis to his words which my pen could never give if I used every epithet in the English language.
Aurora rose from her sofa, and twisting her hair into a thickly-rolled mass at the back of her head, seated herself near the window, and pushed back the Venetian shutter.
“These people dine here today, John?” she asked listlessly.
“The Lofthouses and Colonel Maddison? Yes, my darling; and it’s ever so much past five. Shall I ring for your afternoon cup of tea?”
“Yes, dear; and take some with me, if you will.”
I’m afraid that in his inmost heart Mr. Mellish did not cherish any very great affection for the decoctions of bohea and gunpowder with which his wife dosed him; but he would have dined upon cod-liver oil had she served the banquet; and he strung his nerves to their extreme tension at her supreme pleasure, and affected to highly relish the postmeridian dishes of tea which his wife poured out for him in the sacred seclusion of her dressing-room.
Mrs. Powell heard the comfortable sound of the chinking of the thin eggshell china and the rattling of the spoons, as she passed the half-open door on her way to her own apartment, and was mutely furious as she thought that love and harmony reigned within the chamber where the husband and wife sat at tea.
Aurora went down to the drawing-room an hour after this, gorgeous in maize-coloured silk and voluminous flouncings of black lace, with her hair plaited in a diadem upon her head, and fastened with three diamond stars which John had bought for her in the Rue de la Paix, and which were cunningly fixed upon wire springs, which caused them to vibrate with every chance movement of her beautiful head. You will say, perhaps, that she was arrayed too gaudily for the reception of an old Indian officer and a country clergyman and his wife; but if she loved handsome dresses better than simpler attire, it was from no taste for display, but rather from an innate love of splendour and expenditure, which was a part of her expansive nature. She had always been taught to think of herself as Miss Floyd, the banker’s daughter, and she had been taught also to spend money as a duty which she owed to society.
Mrs. Lofthouse was a pretty little woman, with a pale face and hazel eyes. She was the youngest daughter of Colonel Maddison, and was, “By birth, you know, my dear, far superior to poor Mrs. Mellish, who, in spite of her wealth, is only,” etc. etc. etc., as Margaret Lofthouse remarked to her female acquaintance. She could not very easily forget that her father was the younger brother of a baronet, and had distinguished himself in some terrific manner by bloodthirsty demolition of Sikhs, far away in the untractable East; and she thought it rather hard that Aurora should possess such cruel advantages through some pettifogging commercial genius on the part of her Glasgow ancestors.
But as it was impossible for honest people to know Aurora without loving her, Mrs. Lofthouse heartily forgave her her fifty thousand pounds, and declared her to be the dearest darling in the wide world; while
