Page:Lady Barbarity; a romance (IA ladybarbarityrom00snai).pdf/199

 "And what was that, if she would deign to forgive his importunity?"

"She had met a soldier at her country-house."

It was not delicate, it was characteristic, it was the sort of thing only my Lady Barbara could say; but Captain Grantley would have burnt his leg rather than it should have been unsaid. This was but the first of many speeches that astonished and delighted him. To-night the lady was never more certain of herself, nor was the Captain ever less so. Inch by inch the unwilling victim was lured to his doom.

Presently a servant brought in his supper on a tray that gleamed with damask and silver dishes. Under her ladyship's permission he ate and drank, but every minute his gaze was straying to his dangerous companion, whose little shoes were toasting on the hearth. Many moments of that depressing day his mind had been for her. Some bright, brave gesture jumped up from his bosom to his eyes; a word, a smile, a tone, her charming indignation, her lovely anger against himself and politics, her frank impertinence, her amazing candour, and above all, her apartness from the common herd of women—elegant but featureless. To be explicit, that was how she held poor man. A woman quite unlike her sisters, yet as feminine as anything that ever fibbed and trailed a petticoat. The lords of creation mostly deign to take us women to themselves the moment they can be persuaded that they have caught an entirely new variety. The principle is similar to