"I will never receive Harriet Hunsden!" Lady Kingsland passionately cried.
"Perhaps you will never have the opportunity. She may prefer to become mistress of Strathmore Castle. Lord Ernest is her most devoted adorer. I have not asked her yet. The chances are a thousand to one she will refuse when I do."
His mother laughed scornfully, but her eyes were ablaze.
"You mean to ask her, then?"
"Most assuredly."
She laughed again--a bitter, mirthless laugh.
"We go fast, my friend! And you have hardly known this divinity four-and-twenty hours."
"Love is not a plant of slow growth. Like Jonah's gourd, it springs up, fully matured, in an hour."
"Does it? My son is better versed in amatory floriculture than I am. But before you ask Miss Hunsden to become Lady Kingsland, had you not better inquire who her mother was?"
The baronet thought of the letter, and turned very pale.
"Her mother? I do not understand. What of her mother?"
"Only this"--Lady Kingsland arose as she spoke, her face deathly white, her pale eyes glittering--"the mother is a myth and a mystery. Report says Captain Hunsden was married in America--no one knows where--and America is a wide place. No one ever saw the wife; no one ever heard Miss Hunsden speak of her mother; no one ever heard of that mother's death. I leave Sir Everard Kingsland to draw his own inferences."
She swept from the room with a mighty rustle of silk. A dark figure crouching on the rug, with its ear to the keyhole, barely had time to whisk behind a tall Indian cabinet as the door opened.
It was Miss Sybilla Silver, who was already asserting her prerogative as amateur lady's-maid.
My lady shut herself up in her own room for the remainder of the evening, too angry and mortified for words to tell. It was the first quarrel she and her idolized son ever had, and the disappointment of all her ambitious hopes left her miserable enough.
But scarcely so miserable as Sir Everard. To be hopelessly in love on such short notice was bad enough; to have the dread of a rejection hanging over him was worse; but to have this dark mystery looming horribly in the horizon was worst of all.
His mother's insinuations alone would not have disturbed him; but those insinuations, taken in unison with Captain Hunsden's mysterious illness of the morning, drove him nearly wild.
"And I dare not even ask," he thought, "or set my doubts at rest. Any inquiry from me, before proposing, would be impertinent; and after proposing they would be too late. But one thing I am certain of--if I lose Harrie Hunsden, I shall go mad!"