Page:The Fate of Fenella (1892).djvu/70

 a woman, and only remembered that a child was hurt—your child!" The last words were murmured only for his ear.

"Come away," said Onslow briefly, but consolingly.

A very thunder-cloud, charged with electricity, overhung the end of one of the long dinner tables in the Prospect Hotel that evening.

Lord Castleton presided at the foot, the post of honor. On his right hand, seated thus low, as befitted new guests, were Lord Francis Onslow, and, "by Jove! Mme. de Vigny herself." To his left Jacynth, faithful to his place beside Fenella, who had asked the head-waiter some days ago not to move her seat higher, in usual hotel progression, opposite a sour-faced set of ladies, with side-ringlets and warming-pan brooches, who whispered inuendoes [sic] about herself that palled as a diversion. She had then innocently preferred new arrivals. So Castleton looked at four freezingly expressionless faces, four pairs of eyes bottling up lightnings.

"In for a storm!" he chuckled to himself, rubbing his plump hands under the table. "But who is my lady keeping that empty place for on her other side?"

Just then a slight young man, with blond curls clustering thickly on his head, well-waxed mustaches, and a slightly foreign military air