Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/20

 struck it clumsily with the edge of the spoon, and asked in an affected drawl:

"What are you people talking about?"

Mrs. Sleath, smiling maliciously, took it upon herself to reply.

"Mr. Drake has had a letter from Mr. Cheeseman. He writes that he's engaged, but doesn't say who to. Delicious mystery, isn't it?"

The listener tried to swallow a piece of bread-and-butter, and seemed to struggle with a constriction of the throat. Then, looking round the table, she said with contemptuous pleasantry:

"Some lodging-house servant, I shouldn't wonder."

Every one laughed. Then Mr. Drake declared he must be off and rose from the table. The ladies also moved, and in a minute or two Miss Jewell sat at her breakfast alone.

She was a tall, slim person, with unremarkable, not ill-moulded features. Nature meant her to be graceful in form and pleasantly feminine of countenance; unwholesome habit of mind and body was responsible for the defects that now appeared in her. She had no colour, no flesh; but an agreeable smile would well have become her lips, and her eyes needed only the illumination of healthy thought to be more than commonly attractive. A few months would see the close of her twenty-ninth year; but Mrs. Banting's boarders, with some excuse, judged her on the wrong side of thirty.

Her meal, a sad pretence, was soon finished. She went to the window and stood there for five minutes looking at the cabs and pedestrians in the sunny street. Then, with the languid step which had become natural to her, she ascended the stairs and turned into the drawing-room. Here, as she had expected, two ladies sat in close conversation. Without heeding them, she walked