She raised herself instantly, with a smile on her face--a smile so completely and unmistakably artificial, and put on for purposes of concealment, that it scared Everard almost more than her trouble did. “What, Everard!” she said, “is it you? This is a pleasure I was not looking for--” and she rose up and held out her hands to him. There was some trace of redness about her eyes; but it looked more like want of rest than tears; and as her manner was manifestly put on, a certain jauntiness, quite unlike Miss Susan, had got into it. The smile which she forced by dint of the strong effort required to produce it, got exaggerated, and ran almost into a laugh; her head had a little nervous toss. A stranger would have said her manner was full of affectation. This was the strange aspect which her emotion took.
“What is the matter?” Everard repeated, taking her hands into his, and looking at her earnestly. “Is there bad news?”
“No, no; nothing of the kind. I had a little attack of--that old pain I used to suffer from--neuralgia, I suppose. As one gets older one dislikes owning to rheumatism. No, no, no bad news; a little physical annoyance--nothing more.”
Everard tried hard to recollect what the “old pain” was, but could not succeed in identifying anything of the kind with the always vigorous Miss Susan. She interrupted his reflections by saying with a very jaunty air, which contrasted strangely with her usual manner, “Did you meet our aristocratic visitors?”
“An old Frenchman, with a funny little child clasped round his neck,” said Everard, to whose simple English understanding all foreigners were Frenchmen, “and a very handsome young woman. Do they belong here? I did meet them, and could not make them out. The old man looked a genial old soul. I liked to see him with the child. Your visitors! Where did you pick them up?”
“These are very important people to the house and to the race,” said Miss Susan, with once more, so to speak, a flutter of her wings. “They are--but come, guess; does nothing whisper to you who they are?”
“How should it?” said Everard, in his dissatisfaction with Miss Susan’s strange demeanor growing somewhat angry. “What have such people to do with you? The old fellow is nice-looking enough, and the woman really handsome; but they don’t seem the kind of people one would expect to see here.”