Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/300

Rh "This fancy of yours."

Lady Hilda grew very pale.

"My dear Clairvaux," she said, with chilliest contempt, "you are not my keeper, nor my husband, nor anything else, except one of my trustees. I do not know that being a trustee gives you a title to be impertinent. You really talk as you might to your gamekeeper's daughter, if you thought you saw the girl 'going wrong.' What M. Della Rocca feels for me is merely sympathy in ideas and tastes. But if it were anything else, whose business would it be?"

Lord Clairvaux laughed.

"Yes!—you are a likely creature to inspire friendship! As if there were ever a woman worth looking at who could keep a man at that!—don't let us fence about it, Hilda. Perhaps I haven't any right to say anything. You're your own mistress and all that, and answerable to nobody. Only, can you deny that I am your brother?"

"I have always understood you were! I confess you make me regret the circumstance."

"Now that's ill-natured, very ill-natured," he