He was quite excited, and it did not occur to Horatia, amused and rather pleased, to wonder whether his indignation were on behalf of the excluded visitor or the secluded lady.
"You seem to know a great deal about it," she observed, smiling.
But M. de la Roche-Guyon here got up rather suddenly and said that he must be going. Horatia, could she have read his thoughts, might have reassured him, and told him that the sound he had heard was not the Rector opening the drawing-room window, with a view to sallying forth, but the garden gate, which was loose on the latch.
He had raised her hand in the graceful foreign fashion to his lips before she said, "But shall I not see you to-morrow?"
"To-morrow!" said he with enthusiasm. "Do you tell me that you, Mademoiselle, will be at the dinner-party of the Squire to which I am told I am bidden?"
"Yes," said Miss Grenville. "And I shall be interested to observe whether, after dinner, you follow the English fashion or the French."
"After what you have told me, is there need to ask?"
Horatia went into the house singing. Something shining and vital seemed to have brushed against her in passing to-day.
The impression which Miss Grenville gained of M. de la Roche-Guyon at the Squire's dinner-party next day was that, though separated from her by the length of the table, many épergnes and piles of fruit, and though something monopolised by the ladies on either side of him, he was always looking in her direction if she happened to glance in his. It gave her a curious and entirely novel sensation.
In the drawing-room afterwards all the ladies were loud in his praises. "So charming, and with such courtly manners--so distinguished, and O, so handsome! How interesting, too, that he should be a friend of Mr. Hungerford's--characters so totally unlike, and tastes too, one would imagine. But evidently the Count knows how to be all things to all men!"
Horatia, to whom this last remark was made, stiffened a little on Tristram's behalf. "I think it was very good of Mr. Hungerford to ask him to stay with him," she said, "for he is only an acquaintance. It is really M. de la Roche-Guyon's brother whom Mr. Hungerford knows."
When the gentlemen came in from the dining-room, rather earlier than they were expected, there was a knot of ladies in the centre of the room, of which, however, Horatia was not a part. Into this circle M. de la Roche-Guyon was immediately absorbed, and a buzz of laughter and conversation at once arose.