Blind Love

Had Mountjoy arrived to take Iris away, before her preparations for

travelling were complete? Both the ladies hurried to the window, but

they were too late. The rapid visitor, already hidden from them under

the portico, was knocking smartly at the door. In another minute, a

man's voice in the hall asked for "Miss Henley." The tones--clear,

mellow, and pleasantly varied here and there by the Irish accent--were

not to be mistaken by any one who had already hear them. The man in the

hall was Lord Harry.

In that serious emergency, Mrs. Vimpany recovered her presence of mind.

She made for the door, with the object of speaking to Lord Harry before

he could present himself in the drawing-room. But Iris had heard him

ask for her in the hall; and that one circumstance instantly stripped

of its concealments the character of the woman in whose integrity she

had believed. Her first impression of Mrs. Vimpany--so sincerely

repented, so eagerly atoned for--had been the right impression after

all! Younger, lighter, and quicker than the doctor's wife, Iris reached

the door first, and laid her hand on the lock.

"Wait a minute," she said.

Mrs. Vimpany hesitated. For the first time in her life at a loss what

to say, she could only sign to Iris to stand back. Iris refused to

move. She put her terrible question in the plainest words: "How does Lord Harry know that I am in this house?"

The wretched woman (listening intently for the sound of a step on the

stairs) refused to submit to a shameful exposure, even now. To her

perverted moral sense, any falsehood was acceptable, as a means of

hiding herself from discovery by Iris. In the very face of detection,

the skilled deceiver kept up the mockery of deceit.

"My dear," she said, "what has come to you? Why won't you let me go to

my room?"

Iris eyed her with a look of scornful surprise. "What next?" she said.

"Are you impudent enough to pretend that I have not found you out,

yet?"

Sheer desperation still sustained Mrs. Vimpany's courage. She played

her assumed character against the contemptuous incredulity of Iris, as

she had sometimes played her theatrical characters against the hissing

and hooting of a brutal audience.

"Miss Henley," she said, "you forget yourself!"

"Do you think I didn't see in your face," Iris rejoined, "that you

heard him, too? Answer my question."

"What question?"

"You have just heard it."