MATTER IF SHE DOES?"

About noon on the day after the occurrences related in the last chapter
Lady George owned to herself that she was a most unfortunate young
woman. Her husband had gone out, and she had not as yet told him
anything of what that odious Augusta Mildmay had said to her. She had
made various little attempts but had not known how to go on with them.
She had begun by giving him her history of the Baroness, and he had
scolded her for giving the woman a sovereign and for taking the woman
about London in her carriage. It is very difficult to ask in a fitting
way for the sympathies and co-operation of one who is scolding you. And
Mary in this matter wanted almost more than sympathy and co-operation.
Nothing short of the fullest manifestation of affectionate confidence
would suffice to comfort her; and, desiring this, she had been afraid
to mention Captain De Baron's name. She thought of the waltzing,
thought of Susanna, and was cowardly. So the time slipped away from
her, and when he left her on the following morning her story had not
been told. He was no sooner gone than she felt that if it were to be
told at all it should have been told at once.

Was it possible that that venomous girl should really go to her husband
with such a complaint? She knew well enough, or at any rate thought
that she knew, that there had never been an engagement between the girl
and Jack De Baron. She had heard it all over and over again from
Adelaide Houghton, and had even herself been present at some joke on
the subject between Adelaide and Jack. There was an idea that Jack was
being pursued, and Mrs. Houghton had not scrupled to speak of it before
him. Mary had not admired her friend's taste, and had on such
occasions thought well of Jack because he had simply disowned any
consciousness of such a state of things. But all this had made Mary
sure that there was not and that there never had been any engagement;
and yet the wretched woman, in her futile and frantic endeavours to
force the man to marry her, was not ashamed to make so gross an attack
as this!

If it hadn't been for Lady Susanna and those wretched fortune-telling
cards, and that one last waltz, there would be nothing in it; but as it
was, there might be so much! She had begun to fear that her husband's
mind was suspicious,--that he was prone to believe that things were
going badly. Before her marriage, when she had in truth known him not
at all, her father had give