“I would rather not hear this!” she cried passionately.  “Don’t tell me.”

Lord Hartledon looked at her, begged her pardon, and quitted the room with his cigar.  Lady Maude, black as night, dashed her pencil on to the cardboard, and scored her sketch all over with ugly black lines.  Her face itself looked ugly then.

“Why did he say this to me?” she asked of her fevered heart.  “Was it said with a purpose?  Has he found out that I love him? that my shallow old mother is one of the subtlest of the anglers? and that—­”

“What on earth are you at with your drawing, Maude?”

“Oh, I have grown sick of the sketch.  I am not in a drawing mood to-day, mamma.”

“And how fierce you were looking,” pursued the countess-dowager, who had darted in at rather an inopportune moment for Maude—­darting in on people at such moments being her habit.  “And that was the sketch Hartledon asked you to do for him from the old painting!”

“He may do it himself, if he wants it done.”

“Where is Hartledon?”

“I don’t know.  Gone out somewhere.”

“Has he offended you, or vexed you?”

“Well, he did vex me.  He has just been assuring me with the coolest air that he should never marry; or, at least, not for years and years to come.  He told me to notice what a heap of girls were after him—­or their mothers for them—­and the fun he had over it, not being a marrying man.”

“Is that all?  You need not have put yourself in a fatigue, and spoilt your drawing.  Lord Hartledon shall be your husband before six months are over—­or reproach me ever afterwards with being a false prophetess and a bungling manager.”

Maude’s brow cleared.  She had almost childlike confidence in the tact of her unscrupulous mother.

But how the morning’s conversation altogether rankled in her heart, none save herself could tell:  ay, and in that of the dowager.  Although Anne Ashton was the betrothed of Percival Elster, and Lord Hartledon’s freely-avowed love for her was evidently that of a brother, and he had said he should do all he could to promote the marriage, the strongest jealousy had taken possession of Lady Maude’s heart.  She already hated Anne Ashton with a fierce and bitter hatred.  She turned sick with envy when, in the morning visit that was that day paid by the Ashtons, she saw that Anne was really what Lord Hartledon had described her—­one of the sweetest, most lovable, most charming of girls; almost without her equal in the world for grace and goodness and beauty.  She turned more sick with envy when, at dinner afterwards, to which the Ashtons came, Lord Hartledon devoted himself to them, almost to the neglect of his other guests, lingering much with Anne.

The countess-dowager marked it also, and was furious.  Nothing could be urged against them; they were unexceptionable.  The doctor, a chatty, straightforward, energetic man, of great intellect and learning, and emphatically a gentleman; his wife attracting by her unobtrusive gentleness; his daughter by her grace and modest self-possession.  Whatever Maude Kirton might do, she could never, for very shame, again attempt to disparage them.  Surely there was no just reason for the hatred which took possession of Maude’s heart; a hatred that could never be plucked out again.