Pitt stooped and picked them up, amazed at so much wealth. "Not that,"

Rawdon said. "I hope to put a bullet into the man whom that belongs

to." He had thought to himself, it would be a fine revenge to wrap a

ball in the note and kill Steyne with it.

After this colloquy the brothers once more shook hands and parted. Lady

Jane had heard of the Colonel's arrival, and was waiting for her

husband in the adjoining dining-room, with female instinct, auguring

evil. The door of the dining-room happened to be left open, and the

lady of course was issuing from it as the two brothers passed out of

the study. She held out her hand to Rawdon and said she was glad he

was come to breakfast, though she could perceive, by his haggard

unshorn face and the dark looks of her husband, that there was very

little question of breakfast between them. Rawdon muttered some

excuses about an engagement, squeezing hard the timid little hand which

his sister-in-law reached out to him. Her imploring eyes could read

nothing but calamity in his face, but he went away without another

word. Nor did Sir Pitt vouchsafe her any explanation. The children

came up to salute him, and he kissed them in his usual frigid manner.

The mother took both of them close to herself, and held a hand of each

of them as they knelt down to prayers, which Sir Pitt read to them, and

to the servants in their Sunday suits or liveries, ranged upon chairs

on the other side of the hissing tea-urn. Breakfast was so late that

day, in consequence of the delays which had occurred, that the

church-bells began to ring whilst they were sitting over their meal;

and Lady Jane was too ill, she said, to go to church, though her

thoughts had been entirely astray during the period of family devotion.

Rawdon Crawley meanwhile hurried on from Great Gaunt Street, and

knocking at the great bronze Medusa's head which stands on the portal

of Gaunt House, brought out the purple Silenus in a red and silver

waistcoat who acts as porter of that palace. The man was scared also

by the Colonel's dishevelled appearance, and barred the way as if

afraid that the other was going to force it. But Colonel Crawley only

took out a card and enjoined him particularly to send it in to Lord

Steyne, and to mark the address written on it, and say that Colonel

Crawley would be all day after one o'clock at the Regent Club in St.

James's Street--not at home. The fat red-faced man looked after him

with astonishment as he strode away; so did the people in their Sunday

clothes who were out so early; the charity-boys with shining faces,

the greengrocer lolling at his door, and the publican shutting his

shutters in the sunshine, against service commenced. The people joked

at the cab-stand about his appearance, as he took a carriage there, and

told the driver to drive him to Knightsbridge Barracks.




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