CHAPTER II.

“A PENNILESS ADVENTURESS.”

Lord Abbotsford stood in front of the fire and broke what had been a long silence. He was tall and rather good-looking; years younger than the woman who sat opposite him, her haggard face hidden in her hands. But his voice was rough to brutality as he spoke.

“You knew I should have to marry some day. I can’t see why you are making such a fuss.”

Mrs. Trelane quivered with anger. She had known it, but of late it had been herself whom she had thought of as Lady Abbotsford. After all, why not? She was as well born as he, and there was nothing--that Abbotsford knew--against her. She took her hands from her eyes and looked at him.

“Be civil, it can’t hurt you,” she said coldly.

“Well, you did know it, Helen!” But his eyes fell shiftingly, though he could not know the reason for the despair in hers. Helen Trelane was like a gambler who had put his all on one throw and seen it swept off the board. Her last few hundred pounds of capital had gone in the struggle to be always well dressed and to have a good dinner always for Lord Abbotsford. She had played not for his love, but for his coronet. And to-night his news had cut the very ground from under her feet.

It was for this that she had forsaken the cheerful companions who amused her; to have this dissipated boy stand up and tell her roundly that he was going to be married, and would in future dispense with the pleasure of her acquaintance.

And this to her, who had been born à la Marchant!

But the good blood in her veins did not let her forget that she was penniless and ruined, and that she must drive a bargain with Abbotsford or starve.

She rose from her low chair and looked at him, a beautiful woman still, and young.

“Did you mean to marry a month ago, when you were ready to sell your love to kiss my hand?” she said slowly, cuttingly. “You were ready enough to come here to eat my bread; but it appears I am not fit to eat yours in return. Your wife, Lord Abbotsford, has my sympathy. She will marry a bad-tempered, miserly boy, who thinks of nothing but his own pleasure. Your presents”--she tore some rings off and threw them on a brass table, where they rang loud as they fell--“take them! And go--leave my house. You have told me to my face that I am an adventuress. I tell you that I am a penniless one, and that even so I would rather be myself than you.”

She was magnificent as she faced him, and he stammered when he would have spoken.

He might have said words that would have softened her, might only have hurried the steps of the Nemesis at his heels, but he lost his chance. The door of the small scented room opened quickly, and Ismay, in her shabby clothes, the air still fresh on her cheeks, stood on the threshold.

Mrs. Trelane stood turned to stone.

“Ismay!” she spoke at last. “What brings you here?”

“I forgot. I thought you were alone!” the girl said quietly. She had only a contemptuous glance for Abbotsford, that contrasted him with the man she had just left.

Her mother looked at her as she stood in the doorway; then at Abbotsford, who was utterly astonished.

“You hear,” she said, “this is my daughter. You did not know I had one? Well, I have, and I let her be humiliated that I might have money--for other things.”

She walked over and put her arms round the girl, forgetting for the moment how unwelcome she was in her fresh youth and beauty.

“Go,” she said, over her shoulder; “leave us! We can starve together without you and your wife.”

Abbotsford walked by them without a word, but for once in his ill-spent life he felt small.

But the door had barely closed behind him before Mrs. Trelane drew away from her daughter, and stood looking at her; the anger Abbotsford had roused turned on the girl.

“What madness is this?” she asked hardly. “Had you no sense that you must come in here? And do you know what your freak means to me? If we starve you have yourself to blame!”

She threw herself into a chair, her nerves and temper thoroughly out of hand. And then started at the sound in her own child’s voice.

“Oh, no, we sha’n’t!” said the girl, with a cynical smile on her red lips that were not like Mrs. Trelane’s. “You are too clever, and so”--deliberately--“am I! You forget I’m not a child any longer.”

Mrs. Trelane looked up, and met eyes which were somehow those of an equal, another woman, and spoke truthfully in her raging disappointment.

“That man who went out--he’s going to be married. And I, like a fool, thought he meant to marry me!”

“Can’t you get something out of him?”

“I meant to marry him, I tell you”--roughly. “Those things are all he ever gave me.” She pointed to the cast-off rings on the Moorish table.

“What do you mean about starving?” Ismay asked. “Haven’t you any money? Have you”--deliberately--“spent it all on him?”--with a nod toward the door by which Lord Abbotsford had departed.

Mrs. Trelane moaned.

“I thought it wouldn’t matter. I thought he meant to marry me,” she said faintly. “That was why I kept you out of the way; I didn’t want him to know how old I was till it was all settled. And now”--she flung her hands out angrily--“I will pay him for it all if I kill him!”

“You can sell these things,” Ismay said quickly, looking round her at the costly furniture, the many ornaments.

“There is a bill of sale on them already,” the woman said dryly, and speaking perfectly openly, as if to another woman of her own age and not to her daughter. It was a relief to speak out; she forgot how she had treated the girl since her return, how she had neglected her for the prospect of a rich marriage. “But I’ll get something out of Abbotsford somehow, even if I have to call it a loan,” she added.

“I wouldn’t ever speak to him again,” Ismay remarked scornfully. “And why didn’t you bring me home from school long ago, if you’d no money?”

“Because”--with absolute truth--“I didn’t want a grown-up girl about.”

For a moment the two pairs of eyes met; then the girl shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, I’m here, and I’ll have to stay,” she retorted. “As for Lord Abbotsford, you’re well rid of him. But I suppose you don’t think so. Can I take this candle? There’s no light up-stairs, and I want to go to bed.”

Mrs. Trelane was utterly taken aback by the matter-of-fact conclusion. Somehow Ismay seemed years older to-night, and she had no clue to what had worked the miracle. She pushed a candlestick over to her without answering, and not a word did the girl breathe of where and how she had spent her evening.