April Lady Read Free

the scold! You've been drawing the bustle disgracefully, my dear. You seem not to have the smallest notion of management, and I should doubt whether you have ever kept an account in your life. Now, I am going to settle all these bills of yours and I am also going to place a further hundred pounds to your account. That should—indeed, it must!—keep you in reasonably comfortable circumstances until the quarter."
    She exclaimed: "Oh, thank you! How very kind you are! I will take the greatest care, I promise!"
    "I trust you won't find it necessary to exercise any very stringent economies," he said, with a touch of irony. "But if you have any more bills laid by, give them to me now! I won't scold, but I warn you, Nell, it won't do to keep your money safely in Childe's while you run up debts all over town! There are to be no bills outstanding at the quarter, so if you are concealing any from me now, make a clean breast of them! If I found that you had deceived me, then, indeed, I should be angry with you, and do much more than scold!"
    "What—what would you do, if—if I did happen to owe any money at the quarter?" she asked, looking frightened.
    "Give you only enough money for such trifling expenses as must occur from day to day, and arrange that all your bills are sent to me for payment," he replied.
    "Oh, no!" she cried, flushing.
    "I assure you I should dislike it as much as you, and feel as much humiliated. But I have seen something of what such reckless spending as you appear to delight in may lead to, and I am determined it shall not happen in my household. Now, think, Nell! Have you given me all your bills?"
    The consciousness of having already deceived him, as much as his threat, coupled as it was by a certain look of inflexibility in his face, almost overpowered her. In suppressed agitation, which rendered calm reflection impossible, she said hurriedly: "Yes—oh, yes!"
    "Very well. We shan't speak of this again, then."
    The flurry of her heart subsided; she said in a subdued voice: "Thank you! Indeed, I am very much obliged to you! I did not mean to be such an extravagant wife."
    "Nor I such a tyrannical husband. We could deal better than this, Nell."
    "No, no! I mean, I never thought you so! You are most kind—I beg your pardon for being so troublesome: pray forgive me!"
    "Nell!"
    His hand was outstretched to her, but she did not take it, only smiling nervously, and saying again: "Thank you! You are very good! Oh, how late it is! M-may I go now?"
    His hand fell; he said in quite a different voice: "I am not a schoolmaster! Certainly go, if that is your wish!"
    She murmured something, in disjointed phrases, about his sister, and Almack's and fled out of the room. That gesture, coming as it did at the end of a scene during which he had indeed seemed to be more schoolmaster than husband, seemed to her rather the expression of kindness than of any warmer emotion, and, with her nerves already overset, she had not been able to respond to it as, in general, she had forced herself to respond to any advance made by him. That her retreat might offend him she knew; that it could wound him she had no suspicion, having, from the start of her married life, seen in his love-making only a chivalrous determination not to betray to her that although he had bestowed his name on her his heart belonged to another.
    As for Cardross, he was left with some rather bitter reflections to bear him company, and the growing suspicion that all the well-wishers who had begged him not to marry Nell had been right after all: no good could come of an alliance with an Irvine. One of his cousins, that Pink of the Ton, Mr. Felix Hethersett, had put the matter to him with brutal frankness. "Nothing to say against the girl, dear old boy, but I don't like the stable," had said Mr. Hethersett.
    Well, he had not liked the stable either. Nothing had been further from his intention than marriage with an Irvine; and nothing had seemed more improbable than a