"Wait a little. Have you had any talk with Jacob?"
"I should think not! Evelyn, of course, brings him in perpetually--Jacob this and Jacob that. He seems to have been living in her pocket, and the three have been intriguing against me, morning, noon, and night. Where Julie has found the time I can't imagine; I thought I had kept her pretty well occupied."
Sir Wilfrid surveyed his angry companion and held his peace.
"Why should I want to know?" said Lady Henry, disdainfully. "A lad whom I sent to Eton and Oxford, when his father couldn't pay his bills--what does it matter to me what he thinks?"
"Women are strange folk," thought Sir Wilfrid. "A man wouldn't have said that."
"I thought you were afraid lest he should want to marry her?"
"Oh, let him cut his throat if he likes!" said Lady Henry, with the inconsistency of fury. "What does it matter to me?"
"By-the-way, as to that"--he spoke as though feeling his way--"have you never had suspicions in quite another direction?"
"Well, I hear a good deal in various quarters of the trouble Mademoiselle Le Breton is taking--on behalf of that young soldier who was here just now--Harry Warkworth."
"I dare say. She is always wanting to patronize or influence somebody. It's in her nature. She's a born _intrigante_. If you knew her as well as I do, you wouldn't think much of that. Oh no--make your mind easy. It's Jacob she wants--it's Jacob she'll get, very likely. What can an old, blind creature like me do to stop it?"
"And as Jacob's wife--the wife perhaps of the head of the family--you still mean to quarrel with her?"
"Yes, I _do_ mean to quarrel with her!" and Lady Henry lifted herself in her chair, a pale and quivering image of war--"Duchess or no Duchess! Did you see the audacious way in which she behaved this afternoon?--_how_ she absorbs my guests?--how she allows and encourages a man like Montresor to forget himself?--eggs him on to put slights on me in my own drawing-room!"
"No, no! You are really unjust," said Sir Wilfrid, laying a kind hand upon her arm. "That was not her fault."
"It _is_ her fault that she is what she is!--that her character is such that she _forces_ comparisons between us--between _her_ and _me!_--that she pushes herself into a prominence that is intolerable, considering who and what she is--that she makes me appear in an odious light to my old friends. No, no, Wilfrid, your first instinct was the true one. I shall have to bring myself to it, whatever it costs. She must take her departure, or I shall go to pieces, morally and physically. To be in a temper like this, at my age, shortens one's life--you know that."