"You know from my note that you are here to-night especially to meet Guy and his wife, the wife that he sprang upon us in such a sudden and dramatic manner."
"Yes, I understood that. You know I have been out of the world so long, and more than half the time not in my right senses, that I had heard nothing of the details till, a day or two ago, I picked it up from club gossip. Then I was told that Guy had picked up a girl from nowhere, about whom nothing was known, and married her on the sly at a registry-office. I suppose it would be too unkind to assume that Guy had gone off his head?"
Lord Southleigh growled out from his easy-chair. "Of course he was off his head when he did it. And the devil of it is he seems just as much off his head now. They are like turtle-doves, my dear boy, after several months of marriage."
Lady Nina laughed. "My dear father gets more cynical every day. He insinuates as a general proposition, anyway it can be deduced from his remarks, that every man who marries a girl for love ought to be disillusioned shortly after the honeymoon. Well, certainly Guy is as much in love as ever, and, to be quite fair, she seems just as much in love with him."
"She's putting it on, I suppose," suggested Hugh, who in a less obtrusive fashion was nearly as cynical as his host. "If she came from nowhere, and nobody knows anything about her, we may safely assume that she married him for his money, and that he was too infatuated to recognise the fact. Is she very bewitching?"
"She is certainly very good-looking," was Nina's reply. "Many people say she is beautiful. From a man's point of view, she would be considered very charming in a subtle and elusive sort of way. Of course, my father hates her, it is a terrible shock to his pride to think she is going to inherit the family honours. Guy could have married anybody, although there would always have been still the danger that he would have been married for his money. When it comes to this point, there is not much difference between the well-born and low-born adventuress."
From which remarks it will be gathered that the Lady Nina Spencer was a young woman of independent opinions, and not too strongly imbued with caste prejudices.