“What was Claude saying to you, Frances?” Lady Markham asked with a little anxiety, when everybody save Markham was gone, and they were alone.
“Poor dear boy! About Con, and what she had said of him? He has a faithful heart, though people think him a little too much taken up with himself.”
“He did not say anything about Constance. He asked about the climate and the drains--what are drains?--and if the water was good, and what hotel I could recommend.”
Lady Markham laughed and coloured slightly, and tapped Frances on the cheek. “You are a little satirical----! Dear Claude! he is very anxious about his health. But don’t you see,” she added, “that was all a covert way of finding out about Con? He wants to go after her; but he does not want to let everybody in the world see that he has gone after a girl who would not have him. I have a great deal of sympathy with him, for my part.”
Frances had no sympathy with him. She felt, on the other hand, more sympathy for Constance than had moved her yet. To escape from such a lover, Frances thought a girl might be justified in flying to the end of the world. But it never entered into her mind that any like danger to herself was to be thought of. She dismissed Claude Ramsay from her thoughts with half resentment, half amusement, wondering that Constance had not told her more; but feeling, as no such image had ever risen on her horizon before, that she would not have believed Constance. However, her sister had happily escaped, and to herself, Claude Ramsay was nothing. Far more important was it to think of the ordeal of to-morrow. She shivered a little even in her warm room as she anticipated it. England seemed to be colder, greyer, more devoid of brightness in Portland Place than in Eaton Square.
Frances went to Portland Place next day. She went with great reluctance, feeling that to be thus plunged into the atmosphere of the other side was intolerable. Had she been able to feel that there was absolute right on either side, it would not have been so difficult for her. But she knew so little of the facts of the case, and her natural prepossessions were so curiously double and variable, that every encounter was painful. To be swept into the faction of the other side, when the first impassioned sentiment with which she had felt her mother’s arms around her had begun to sink inevitably into that silent judgment of another individual’s ways and utterances which is the hindrance of reason to every enthusiasm--was doubly hard. She was resolute indeed that not a word or insinuation against her mother should be permitted in her presence. But she herself had a hundred little doubts and questions in her mind, traitors whose very existence no one must suspect but herself. Her natural revulsion from the thought of being forced into partisanship gave her a feeling of strong opposition and resistance against everything that might be said to her, when she stepped into the solemn house in Portland Place, where everything was so large, empty, and still, so different from her mother’s warm and cheerful abode. The manner in which her aunt met her strengthened this feeling. On their previous meeting, in Lady Markham’s presence, the greeting given her by Mrs Clarendon had chilled her through and through. She was ushered in now to the same still room, with its unused look, with all the chairs in their right places, and no litter of habitation about; but her aunt came to her with a different aspect from that which she had borne before. She came quickly, almost with a rush, and took the shrinking girl into her arms. “My dear little Frances, my dear child, my brother’s own little girl!” she cried, kissing her again and again. Her ascetic countenance was transfigured, her grey eyes warmed and shone.