Lady Audley's Secret

My lady burst into her pretty, gushing laugh.

"The dearest of good creatures," she said. "He paid me five-and-twenty pounds a year--only fancy, five-and-twenty pounds! That made six pounds five a quarter. How well I remember receiving the money--six dingy old sovereigns, and a little heap of untidy, dirty silver, that came straight from the till in the surgery! And then how glad I was to get it! While now--I can't help laughing while I think of it--these colors I am using cost a guinea each at Winsor & Newton's--the carmine and ultramarine thirty shillings. I gave Mrs. Dawson one of my silk dresses the other day, and the poor thing kissed me, and the surgeon carried the bundle home under his cloak."

My lady laughed long and joyously at the thought. Her colors were mixed; she was copying a water-colored sketch of an impossibly Turneresque atmosphere. The sketch was nearly finished, and she had only to put in some critical little touches with the most delicate of her sable pencils. She prepared herself daintily for the work, looking sideways at the painting.

All this time Mr. Robert Audley's eyes were fixed intently on her pretty face.

"It is a change," he said, after so long a pause that my lady might have forgotten what she had been talking of, "it is a change! Some women would do a great deal to accomplish such a change as that."

Lady Audley's clear blue eyes dilated as she fixed them suddenly on the young barrister. The wintry sunlight, gleaming full upon her face from a side window, lit up the azure of those beautiful eyes, till their color seemed to flicker and tremble betwixt blue and green, as the opal tints of the sea change upon a summer's day. The small brush fell from her hand, and blotted out the peasant's face under a widening circle of crimson lake.

Robert Audley was tenderly coaxing the crumbled leaf of his cigar with cautious fingers.

"My friend at the corner of Chancery Lane has not given me such good Manillas as usual," he murmured. "If ever you smoke, my dear aunt (and I am told that many women take a quiet weed under the rose), be very careful how you choose your cigars."

My lady drew a long breath, picked up her brush, and laughed aloud at Robert's advice.

"What an eccentric creature you are, Mr. Audley I Do you know that you sometimes puzzle me--"

"Not more than you puzzle me, dear aunt."

My lady put away her colors and sketch book, and seating herself in the deep recess of another window, at a considerable distance from Robert Audley, settled to a large piece of Berlin-wool work--a piece of embroidery which the Penelopes of ten or twelve years ago were very fond of exercising their ingenuity upon--the Olden Time at Bolton Abbey.