“I don’t,” returned De Burgh, shortly.  “Do you know, I have just been dining with Ormonde and his wife, not as their guest, but at Lady Mary Vincent’s.  Tell me, hasn’t he behaved rather badly to you?  I want to know, because I don’t want to cut him without reason.”

“Pray do not cut him on my account, Lord de Burgh.  Colonel Ormonde has very naturally, for a man of his calibre, felt disgusted at my inability to carry out my original arrangements respecting my nephews, and he showed his displeasure, after his kind, with remarkable frankness; but I am not the least angry, and I beg you will make no difference for my sake.”

“If you really wish it—­” he paused, and then went on—­“Mrs. Ormonde whined a good deal to me in a corner about her affection for you, her hard fate, Ormonde’s brutality, etc., etc.; she is a rusee little devil.”

“Poor Ada!  I fancy she has not had a pleasant time of it.  Had she been a woman of feeling, it would have been too dreadful....”

“Well, you make your mind easy on that score.  Now, what about the boys?”

Katherine was vexed to find how impossible it was to talk of them with composure; she was unhinged in some unaccountable way, and Lord de Burgh’s ill-repressed tenderness made her feel nervous.  At length she asked him to come upstairs and look for Mrs. Needham, as her head ached, and she thought she would like to retire if she could be spared.

“Yes, you had better—­you don’t seem up to much,” he returned, pressing her hand slightly against his side.  “I can’t bear to see you look worried and ill.  That’s not a civil speech, I suppose; but, ill or well, you know your face is always the sweetest to me, and I am always dying to know what you are thinking of.  There, I will not worry you now; but shall you be ‘fit’ for this function on Sunday?”

“Oh, yes, quite.”

“I am obliged to run down to Wales—­some matters there want the master’s eye, they tell me—­but I shall return Friday or Saturday.  By the way, I wish you would introduce me to this wonderful Angela of Mrs. Needham’s.”

“Certainly.”

On entering the drawing-room, the first forms that met their eyes were Errington and Miss Bradley; she was sitting in a large crimson velvet chair, against the back of which Errington was leaning.  Angela was looking up at him with a peculiarly happy, absorbed expression, while his head was bent towards her.

“She is deucedly handsome,” said De Burgh, critically, “and much too pleasantly engaged to be interrupted.  I can wait.”

“Yes, I think it would be unkind to break in on such a conversation.  Oh, here is Mrs. Needham!  Do you want me very much, Mrs. Needham? because, if not, I should like to go to bed.  I have a tiresome headache.”

“Go by all means, my dear; you are looking like a ghost; they are all talking and amusing each other now, and don’t want you or me.”  “Good night, then,” said Katherine, giving her hand to De Burgh, and she glided away.