Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 2.pdf/177

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CONDUCTED BY ""
 * No. 34..
 * SATURDAY, JULY 24, 1869.
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Lord and Lady Hetherington were in the dining-room when Joyce entered, the former with his brown velveteen suit splashed and clay-stained, and his thick boots rich with the spoil of many a furrow (he was bitten with a farming and agricultural mania just then), and the latter calm and collected as Walter ever remembered her. She received the visitor with perfect politeness, expressed in a few well-chosen sentences her pleasure at seeing him again, and the satisfaction with which she had learned of his improved position; then, after scanning him with rather a searching glance, she turned to the footman, and asked where was Lady Caroline, and whether she knew luncheon was ready. Joyce replied for the man. Lady Caroline had heard the announcement of luncheon, but had asked him to come in by himself, saying she would follow directly. Her ladyship had gone up to her room, the footman added; he did not think her ladyship was very well. The footman was new to Westhope, or he would have known that the domestics of that establishment were never allowed to think, or at least were expected to keep their thoughts to themselves. Lady Hetherington of course ignored the footman's remark entirely, but addressed herself to Joyce.

"I hope you did not bring down any ill news for Lady Caroline, Mr. Joyce?"

"Not I, indeed. Lady Hetherington. I merely came to ask her ladyship's advice on—well, on a matter of business."

"In which she was interested?"

"No, indeed! I was selfish enough to lay before her a matter in which my own interests were alone concerned."

"Ah!" said Lady Hetherington, with a sigh of relief, "I was afraid it might be some business in which she would have to involve herself for other people, and really she is such an extraordinary woman, constituting herself chaperon to two young women who may be very well in their way, I dare say, but whom nobody ever heard of, and doing such odd things, but—however, that's all right."

Her ladyship subsiding, his lordship here had a chance of expressing his delight at his ex-secretary's advancement, which he did warmly, but in his own peculiar way. So Joyce had gone into Parliament; right, quite right, but wrong side, hey, hey? Radicals and those sort of fellows, hey? Republic and that sort of thing! Like all young men, make mistakes, hey, but know better soon, and come round. Live to see him in the Carlton yet. Knew where he picked up those atrocious doctrines—didn't mind his calling them atrocious, hey, hey?—from Byrne; strange man, clever man, deuced clever, well read, and all that kind of thing, but desperate free-thinker. Thistlewood, Wolfe Tone, and that kind of thing. Never live to see him in the Carlton. No, of coarse not; not the place for him. Recollect the Chronicles? Ah, of course; deuced interestin', all that stuff that—that I wrote then, wasn't it? Had not made much progress since. So taken up with farmin' and that kind of thing; must take him into the park before he left, and show him some alterations just going to be made, which would be an immense improvement, immense impOh, here was Lady Caroline!"

What did that idiotic footman mean by saying he thought Lady Caroline was not