"Pray, what is that?" she cried, openly scornful; and she flirted her fan a little faster.
The blood rushed to her cheeks. This was too much. "Are you jealous? or only impertinent?" she asked, her voice not less furious because it was low and guarded. "How noble, how chivalrous, to say behind a gentleman's back what you would not dare to say to his face!"
Sir Hervey shrugged his shoulders. "He is not a gentleman," he said. "He is not one of us, and he is not fit company for you. I do not know what story he has told you, nor what cards he has played, but I know that what I say is true. Be advised, child," he continued earnestly, "and look on him coldly when you see him next. Be sure if you do not----"
"You will speak to my sister?" she cried. "If you have not done it already? Lord, sir, I congratulate you. I'm sure you have discovered quite a new style of wooing. Next, I suppose, you will have me sent to my room, and put on bread and water for a week? Or buried in a parsonage in the country with Tillotson's Sermons and the 'Holy Living'?"
"I spoke to you as I should speak to my sister," Sir Hervey said, with something akin to apology in his tone.
"Say, rather, as you would speak to your daughter!" she replied, quick as lightning; and, trembling with rage, she drove home the shaft with a low curtsey. "To be sure, sir, now I think of it, the distance between us justifies you in giving me what advice you please."
He winced at last, and was even a trifle out of countenance. But he did not answer, and she, furiously angry, turned her back on him, and looked the other way. Young as she was, all the woman in her rose in revolt against the humiliation of being advised in such a matter by a man. She could have struck him. She hated him. And they were all in the same story. They were all against her and her dear Irishman, who alone understood her. Tears rose in Sophia's eyes as she pictured her present loneliness and her happiness in the past; as she recalled the old home looking down the long avenue of chestnut trees, the dogs, the horses, the boisterous twin brother, and the father who by turns had coarsely chidden and fondly indulged her. In her loss of all this, in a change of life as complete as it was sudden, she had found one only to comfort her, one only who had not thought the whirl of strange pleasures a sufficient compensation for a home and a father. One only who had read her silence, and pitied her inexperience. And him they would snatch from her! Him they would----