Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/959

Rh full of Kitty—Kitty insolent, Kitty triumphant. For him too Kitty made the background of thought,—environed, however, with clouds of indecision and resistance that would have raised happiness in Mary could she have divined them.

For he was now not easy to capture. There had been enough and more than enough of women in his life. The game of politics must somehow replace them henceforth,—if indeed anything were still worth while, except the long day in the saddle, and the dawn of new mornings in untrodden lands.

Mingled, all these, with hot dislike of Ashe, with the fascination of Kitty, and a kind of venomous pleasure in the commotion produced by his pursuit of her; interpenetrated, moreover, through and through, with the memory of his one true feeling, and of the woman who had died, alienated from and despising him. He and Mary passed a profitless half-hour. He would have liked to propitiate her, but he had no notion what he should do with the propitiation if it were reached. He wanted her money, but he was beginning to feel with restlessness that he could not pay the cost. The poet in him was still strong, crossed though it were by the adventurer.

He took her back to the dancing-room. Mary walked beside him with a dull, fierce sense of wrong. It was Kitty of course who had done it,—Kitty who had taken him away from her.

"That's finished," said Cliffe to himself, with a long breath of relief, as he delivered her into the hands of her partner. "Now for the other!"

Thenceforward no one saw Kitty and no one danced with her. She spent her time in beflowered corners or remote drawing-rooms with Geoffrey Cliffe. Ashe heard her voice in the distance once or twice, answering a voice he detested; he looked into the supper-room with a lady on his arm, and across it he saw Kitty, with her white elbow on the table, and her hand propping a face that was turned—half mocking and yet wholly absorbed—to Cliffe. He saw her flitting across vistas, or disappearing through far doorways, but always with that sinister figure in attendance.

His mind was divided between a secret fury—roused in him by the pride of a man of high birth and position, who has always had the world at command, and now sees an impertinence offered him which he does not know how to punish—and a mood of irony. Cliffe's persecution of Kitty was a piece of confounded bad manners. But to look at it with the round hypocritical eyes some of these people were bringing to bear on it was really too much! Let them look to their own affairs—they needed it.

At last the party broke up. Kitty touched him on the shoulder as he was standing on the stairs, apparently absorbed in a teasing skirmish with a charming child in her first season, who thought him the most delightful of men.

"I'm ready, William."

He turned sharply, and saw that she was alone.

"Come along, then! In five minutes more I should have been asleep on the stairs."

They descended. Kitty went for her cloak. Ashe sent for the carriage. As he was standing on the steps Cliffe passed him and called for a hansom. It came in the rear of two or three carriages already under the portico. He ran along the pavement and jumped in. The doors were just being shut by the linkman, when a little figure in a white cloak flew down the steps of the house and held up a hand to the driver of the hansom.

"Do you see that?" said Lady Parham, in a voice of suppressed but contemptuous amazement, as she turned to Mary Lyster, who was driving home with her. "Call my carriage, please!" she said, imperiously, to one of the footmen at the door. Her carriage, as it happened, was immediately behind the hansom; but the hansom could not move because of the small lady who had jumped upon the step and was leaning eagerly forward.

There was a clamor of shouting voices: "Move on; cabby, move on!" "Stand clear, ma'am, please," said the driver, while Cliffe opened the door of the cab and seemed about to jump down again.

"Who is it?" said an impatient judge behind Lady Parham. "What's the matter?"

Lady Parham shrugged her shoulders.

"It's Lady Kitty Ashe," whispered the