Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/173

 she shared with all under that roof; for Lady Sarah she had the deep respect which she extended to every member of the august clan it had been her privilege to serve for so many years. In the devout eyes of Harriet Sanderson each unit of that clan was not as other men and women. In the matter of Bridport House and all that it stood for, she was more royalist than the king.

From the dark hour, a week ago now, in which the news had come by a side wind, that the fates by a stroke of perverse cruelty, as it seemed, had thrown Mary across the path of Mr. Dinneford, she had hardly known how to lay her head on her pillow. To her mind the whole thing was simply calamitous. It had thrown her into a state of profound unhappiness. She now came into the room looking worn and ill, yet fully prepared for short shift to be meted out to her by those whom she found assembled there.

The ladies looked for defiance, no doubt. And they may have looked for an undercurrent of malicious triumph. Yet if they expected either of these things their mistake was at once very clear. It was hard to find a trace of the successful intriguer in the haggard cheeks and somber eyes of the woman before them. But to minds such as theirs portents of this kind could not be expected to weigh in the scale against their pre-*conceived ideas.

It was left to Lady Wargrave to fix the charge. And this she did with a blunt precision which was itself a form of insult. The icy tones were scrupulously polite, nothing was said which one in her position was not entitled to say in such circumstances, yet the whole