, and adding, "You are
alone?"

She stared, and let fall "Certainly," and then laughed. "I had forgotten
your regard for the proprieties. I have just sent my maid for Georgiana;
she will sleep here. I preferred to come here, because those people at
the hotel tire me; and, besides, I said I should sleep at the villa, and
I never go back to people who don't expect me."

Wilfrid looked about the room perplexed, and almost suspicious because of
his unexplained perplexity. Her (as he deemed it--not much above the
level of Mrs. Chump in that respect) aristocratic indifference to opinion
and conventional social observances would have pleased him by daylight,
but it fretted him now.

Lady Charlotte's maid came in to say that Miss Ford would join her. The
maid was dismissed to her bed. "There's nothing to do there," said her
mistress, as she was moving to the folding-doors. The window facing
seaward was open. He went straight to it and closed it. Next, in an
apparent distraction, he went to the folding-doors. He was about to press
the handle, when Lady Charlotte's quiet remark, "My bedroom," brought him
back to his seat, crying pardon.

"Have you had news?" she inquired. "You thought that a letter might be
there. Bad, is it?"

"It is not good," he replied, briefly.

"I am sorry."

"That is--it tells me--" (Wilfrid disciplined his tongue) "that I--we
are--a lieutenant on half-pay may say that he is ruined, I suppose, when
his other supplies are cut off!..."

"I can excuse him for thinking it," said Lady Charlotte. She exhibited no
sign of eagerness for his statement of facts.

Her outward composure and a hard animation of countenance (which, having
ceased the talking within himself, he had now leisure to notice)
humiliated him. The sting helped him to progress.

"I may try to doubt it as much as I please, to avoid seeing what must
follow.... I may shut my eyes in the dark, but when the light stares me
in the face...I give you my word that I have not been justified even in
imagining such a catastrophe."

"The preamble is awful," said Lady Charlotte, rising from her recumbent
posture.

"Pardon me; I have no right to intrude my feelings. I learn to-day, for
the first time, that we are--are ruined."

She did not lift her eyebrows, or look fixedly; but without any change at
all, said, "Is there no doubt about it?"

"None whatever." This was given emphatically. Resentment at the perfect
realization of her anticipated