"If our cottages can be reasonably attacked, they must be put in order, and at once," she said, with dignity. "You, Mr. Page, are my eyes and ears. I have been accustomed to trust you."
The agent accepted the implied reproach with outward meekness, and an inward resolve to put Lady Coryston on a much stricter financial regime for the future.
A long conversation followed, at the end of which Mr. Page rose, with the remark:
"Your ladyship will be sorry to hear that Mr. Glenwilliam is to speak at Martover next month,--and that it is already rumored Lord Coryston will be in the chair."
He had kept this bombshell to the last, and for various reasons he closely watched its effect.
"We will have a Tory meeting here the same night, and my son Arthur shall speak," she said, with vivacity.
Some odd thoughts arose in the mind of Mr. Page as he met the angry fire in the speaker's look.
"By all means. By the way, I did not know Mr. Arthur was acquainted with those strange people the Atherstones?" he said, in a tone of easy interrogation, looking for his hat.
Lady Coryston was a little surprised by the remark.
"I suppose an M.P. must be acquainted with everybody--to some extent," she said, smiling. "I know very well what his opinion of Mr. Atherstone is."
"Naturally," said Page, also smiling. "Well, good-by, Lady Coryston. I hope when you see Lord Coryston this afternoon you will be able to persuade him to give up some of these extravagances."
"I have no power with him," she said, sharply.
"Why did you give up what you had?" thought the agent, as he took his departure. His long experience of Lady Coryston, able as she was, and as he admitted her to be, in many respects, had in the end only increased in him a secret contempt for women, inbred in all but a minority of men. They seemed to him to have so little power of "playing the game"--the old, old game of success that men understand so well; through compromise, cunning, give and take, shrewd and prudent dealing. A kind of heady blundering, when caution and a few lies would have done all that was wanted--it was this he charged them with--Lady Coryston especially.
And as to that nice but rather stupid fellow Arthur, what on earth could he be doing at the Atherstones'? Had he--Page--come by chance on a secret,--dramatic and lamentable!--when, on the preceding Saturday, as he was passing along the skirts of the wood bounding the Atherstones' little property, on his way to one of the Coryston hill-farms, he had perceived in the distance--himself masked by a thin curtain of trees--two persons in the wood-path, in intimate or agitated conversation. They were Arthur Coryston and Miss Glenwilliam. He recognized the lady at once, had several times seen her on the platform when her father spoke at meetings, and the frequent presence of the Glenwilliams at the Atherstones' cottage was well known to the neighborhood.