My lord hummed again. 'I suspect we 're going to get a drubbing. This fellow here has had his French maitre d'armes. Show me your hand, sir.'
Weyburn smiled, and extended his right hand, saying: 'The wrist wants exercise.'
'Ha! square thumb, flesh full at the nails' ends; you were a bowler at cricket.'
'Now examine the palms, my lord; I judge by the lines on the palms,' Mrs. Pagnell remarked.
Coffee had not been served, she reminded him; it was coming in, so down he sat a yard from the table; outwardly equable, inwardly cursing coffee; though he refused to finish a meal without his cup.
'I think the palms do betray something,' said Mrs. Lawrence; and Aminta said: 'Everything betrays.'
'No, my dear,' Mrs. Pagnell corrected her; 'the extremities betray, and we cannot read the centre. Is it not so, my lord?'
She was disappointed in her scheme to induce a general examination of palms, and especially his sphinx lordship's.
Weyburn controlled the tongue she so frequently tickled to an elvish gavotte, but the humour on his face touched Mrs. Lawrence's to a subdued good-fellow roguishness, and he felt himself invited to chat with her on the walk for a reposeful ten minutes in Aminta's drawing-room.
Mrs. Pagnell, 'quite enjoying the company,' as she told her niece, was dismayed to hear her niece tell her of a milliner's appointment, positive for three o'clock; and she had written it in her head 'p.m., four o'clock,' and she had mislaid or destroyed the milliner's note; and she still had designs upon his lordship's palms, things to read and hint around her off the lines. She departed.
Lord Ormont became genial; and there was no one present who did not marvel that he should continue to decree a state of circumstances more or less necessitating the infliction he groaned under. He was too lofty to be questioned, even by his favourites. Mrs. Lawrence conjured the ghost of Lady Charlotte for an answer: this being Lord Adderwood's idea. Weyburn let his thoughts go on fermenting. Pride froze a beginning stir in the bosom of Aminta.
Her lord could captivate a reluctant woman's bosom when he was genial. He melted her and made her call up her bitterest pride to perform its recent office. That might have failed; but it had support in a second letter received from the man accounted both by Mrs. Lawrence and by Mr. Weyburn 'dangerous'; and the thought of who it was that had precipitated her to 'play little games' for the sole sake of rousing him through jealousy to a sense of righteous duty, armed her desperately against him. She could exult in having read the second letter right through on receipt of it, and in remembering certain phrases; and notably in a reflection shot across her bewildered brain by one of the dangerous man's queer mad sentences: 'Be as iron as you like, I will strike you to heat'; and her thought: Is there assurance of safety in a perpetual defence?--all while she smiled on her genial lord, and signified agreement, with a smiting of wonderment at her heart, when he alluded to a panic shout of the country for defence, and said: 'Much crying of that kind weakens the power to defend when the real attack comes.' Was it true?