“I brought a bag.  Arthur took it in for me.”

“I’m so sorry!  I assure you, if I had only known—­But we haven’t a corner!  Mr. Meadows will bear me out—­it’s absurd, but true.  These Scotch lodges have really no room in them at all!”

Lady Dunstable pointed with airy insolence to the spreading pile behind her.  Doris—­for all the agitation of her hidden purpose—­could have laughed outright.  But Meadows, rather roughly, intervened.

“We shall, of course, go to the hotel, Lady Dunstable.  My wife’s letter seems somehow to have missed me, but naturally we never dreamed of putting you out.  Perhaps you will give us some lunch—­my wife seems rather tired—­and then we will take our departure.”

Doris turned—­put a hand on his arm—­but addressed Lady Dunstable.

“Can I see you—­alone—­for a few minutes—­before lunch?”

“Before lunch?  We are all very hungry, I’m afraid,” said Lady Dunstable, with a smile.  Meadows was conscious of a rising fury.  His quick sense perceived something delicately offensive in every word and look of the great lady.  Doris, of course, had done an incredibly foolish thing.  What she had come to say to Lady Dunstable he could not conceive; for the first explanation—­that of a silly jealousy—­had by now entirely failed him.  But it was evident to him that Lady Dunstable assumed it—­or chose to assume it.  And for the first time he thought her odious!

Doris seemed to guess it, for she pressed his arm as though to keep him quiet.

“Before lunch, please,” she repeated.  “I think—­you will soon understand.”  With an odd, and—­for the first time—­slightly puzzled look at her visitor, Lady Dunstable said with patronising politeness—­

“By all means.  Shall we come to my sitting-room?”

She led the way to the house.  Meadows followed, till a sign from Doris waved him back.  On the way Doris found herself greeted by Sir Luke Malford, bowed to by various unknown gentlemen, and her hand grasped by Miss Field.

“You do look done!  Have you come straight from London?  What—­is Rachel carrying you off?  I shall send you in a glass of wine and a biscuit directly!”

Doris said nothing.  She got somehow through all the curious eyes turned upon her; she followed Lady Dunstable through the spacious passages of the Lodge, adorned with the usual sportsman’s trophies, till she was ushered into a small sitting-room, Lady Dunstable’s particular den, crowded with photographs of half the celebrities of the day—­the poets, savants, and artists, of England, Europe, and America.  On an easel stood a masterly small portrait of Lord Dunstable as a young man, by Bastien Lepage; and not far from it—­rather pushed into a corner—­a sketch by Millais of a fair-haired boy, leaning against a pony.

By this time Doris was quivering both with excitement and fatigue.  She sank into a chair, and turned eagerly to the wine and biscuits with which Miss Field pursued her.  While she ate and drank, Lady Dunstable sat in a high chair observing her, one long and pointed foot crossed over the other, her black eyes alive with satiric interrogation, to which, however, she gave no words.