Opening the door of her friend"s bedroom, she paused on the threshold, and gave a little exclamation of admiration. Lady Frances Hope was standing before a long mirror, while the maid Rees knelt upon the ground beside her, giving the finishing touches to the skirt of a strikingly beautiful dress.
Clodagh clasped her hands in a gesture of delight; then ran forward into the room.
"How splendid you look!" she cried. "Where are you going? What a heavenly dress!"
Lady Frances smiled.
"At last!" she exclaimed, holding out her cheek to be kissed. "What have you been doing with yourself? I have been persecuted with inquiries for you."
Clodagh laughed excitedly.
"I have been paying bills!" she said in a high, light voice.
"So that you may begin to run up new ones?"
"Quite possibly! But where are you going? All this magnificence makes me curious." She sank into a low chair and glanced with bright, interested eyes at her stately companion.
But Lady Frances ignored her question.
"We shall soon be finished with all vain glories!" she said. "The season is dying--even if it"s dying hard. Do you pine for the country, now that the heat has come? I shall expect you to love Tuffnell, you know. It really is quaint! Even I am fond of it."
Clodagh looked up eagerly.
"Of course I shall love Tuffnell. It has been sweet of your sister to ask me there--but it has been sweeter still of her to ask Nance. You don"t know what it will be for me to meet Nance down there--away from everything." Her voice fell a little.
Lady Frances laughed pleasantly.
"I am so glad you have arranged that she should come right on from Liverpool, instead of staying in town for a night," she said easily.
"It will be much the simpler plan. By the way, what day will we arrange to go down? You and I, I mean? Diana"s big dance is on the fifth.
Suppose we go down a day or two before?"
Clodagh responded instantly.
"Yes," she said--"yes, certainly. But talking of the dance reminds me of my curiosity. Where _are_ you going to-night?"
This time evasion was impossible. Lady Frances turned to the dressing-table and picked up a diamond ornament.
"You can fix this in, Rees," she said, "and then go. I am going to the Tamperleighs"," she added carelessly, without looking at Clodagh.
"The Tamperleighs"?"
"In Grosvenor Place. Dull people."
Clodagh picked up a fan that was lying on a table near her, and examined it thoughtfully.
"Isn"t Lady Tamperleigh an aunt of Sir Walter Gore"s?"
"Yes; and old Lord Tamperleigh is a cousin of my mother"s--which connects Walter and me in a roundabout way."
There was a slight silence, while Rees hovered about her mistress with one or two last attentions and then quietly left the room. As she closed the door, Clodagh looked up from the fan she had been studying so attentively.
"Lady Frances," she said quickly, "you know Lady Tamperleigh very well?"
Lady Frances" eyes became vigilant.
"Yes," she said vaguely--"oh, yes!"
"Then take me with you to her party--as you took me to the Hensleys"
and the Vibrants" last week? I"m wild to go somewhere--to go anywhere to-night." She paused excitedly; then, as her eyes scanned Lady Frances"s face, her expression fell.
"Of course if there"s the least--the very least--difficulty----"
With a swift, tactful movement, Lady Frances came towards her.
"My dear Clodagh! Don"t! You _know_ how proud I am of you. My hesitation was merely----"
"Merely what?"
Lady Frances laid her hand upon Clodagh"s shoulder.
"Walter came back from Russia a week ago. He will be there to-night; and I think--I think"--she seemed to hesitate--"I think that perhaps, in view of his narrow ideas, it might be pleasanter for you----" She left the sentence expressively unfinished.
Clodagh rose rather hastily, her face red.
"Of course!" she said--"of course! Sir Walter Gore is the last man in London I should wish to meet."
Lady Frances said nothing, but moving calmly across the room, took her cloak from a chair.
"Where can I drop you?" she asked. "At the club?"
For a second Clodagh stood, staring with very bright eyes at an open window, across which a lace curtain hung motionless in the still, hot air; then she lifted her head and, in her own turn, crossed the room.
"Yes," she said quietly--"yes, at the club."
Not many days later, Clodagh--in company with Lady Frances Hope--left London for Buckinghamshire, on her promised visit to the latter"s sister--Lady Diana Tuffnell.
The house party at Tuffnell Place was to include--beside one or two men and women of personal distinction--a small section of Lady Frances Hope"s coterie from the merely fashionable world, comprising Lord Deerehurst, Serracauld, and Mrs. Bathurst. For although Lady Diana Tuffnell was very uncompromising in the choice of her own friends, she had always been a complacent sister; and Tuffnell Place generally opened its doors during the month of July to Lady Frances Hope and her intimates.
It was late in the evening when Clodagh arrived; and the old Elizabethan house, with its many windows of thick, small-paned gla.s.s and its fine oak-raftered hall, filled her with delight. After she had been greeted by Lady Diana, and introduced to Mr. Tuffnell--a typical, kindly English squire, who invariably went his own way straightly and was content to a.s.sume that others did the same--she pa.s.sed up the shallow staircase and entered the room that had been allotted to her, with a sense of something nearer to happiness than she had known for months. In the whole air of the house and its inmates there was a suggestion of restfulness, of friendliness, of sincerity to which she had been long a stranger. Unconsciously she warmed and softened under the homelike atmosphere. And when, a quarter of an hour later, Simonetta came softly into the bright, chintz-hung bedroom, she found her mistress busily unpacking her writing-case and sorting her letters at an old-fashioned oak writing-table.
That night the two visitors--who had preceded the other members of the house party by a day--dined alone with their host and hostess.
They were a very small party for the great dining-hall; but Clodagh was conscious that at many a crowded restaurant she would have been less well amused. There was a feeling of sincerity in the atmosphere, an honest desire on the part of the entertainers to put their guest at her ease, that precluded dulness and artificiality.
After dinner, Lady Frances wandered off to the billiard-room with her brother-in-law, and Clodagh followed her hostess into the drawing-room--a long, tapestried room full of the scent of roses.
The lamps were lighting when they entered; but the windows were set wide open, admitting the fragrance of the garden. Involuntarily Clodagh crossed the room, and paused beside one of these broad windows.