Page:The Semi-attached Couple.djvu/177

 "I am very uneasy about Lady Sophia, who is ill."

"Dear me! I am so sorry: I hope her ladyship is not dangerous."

"Not dangerously ill, you mean. No, I trust not, but I am very anxious to see her, and I shall go and meet her at Eskdale on Tuesday, so you must have everything ready for that morning."

"Yes, my lady; does my lord go with us?" This was asked in a stiff, affronted tone. "Mr. Phillips was speaking at the tea of my lord's being going to London on Tuesday, but I suppose he meant Eskdale Castle."

"No, my lord has business in London. Give me my gloves and some Eau de Cologne, my head aches so much."

"I wish your ladyship would let me bring you some dinner up here, and keep quiet against the evening. Them lights and all that clatter will be so bad for your head: just lie down for an hour, my lady."

"Well, perhaps it will be the best thing I can do."

"There's my lord's room door just gone to. Shall I call his lordship, and you tell him, my lady, that you don't feel well?"

"No, no, don't call him. There is no use in making a fuss about a headache. My handkerchief, Tomkinson, I will go down"; and she went.

"Well, if my lord has not turned out a brute at last, I'm much mistaken, and that is what I never was yet. I wish we'd never seen him; and to think of him, indeed, lording it over my lady, who is too good by half for him. See if I don't tell them all at Eskdale what he is; and yet I won't neither, for Lady Walden's maid is always casting up to me how happy her lord and lady is. And as for letting her have a triumph, I am not so mean as that neither. As for Lady Sophia's illness, I don't think much of that. She was always a one for making much of a little,