“No, I was not inquisitive. I was only vastly hipped for want of knowing what to do with myself. And I ran to bid her ladyship good morning, for it was close upon one o’clock; but she frowned at me, and pushed me aside with a ‘Go to your bed, troublesome imp! What business have you up at this hour?’ ‘As much business as you have riding about in your coach,’ I had a mind to say, mais je me tenais coy; and made her ladyship la belle Jennings’ curtsy instead. She sinks lower and rises straighter than any of the other ladies. I watched her on mother’s visiting-day. Lord, auntie, how white you are! One might take you for a ghost!” Angela put the little prattler aside, more gently, perhaps, than the mother had done, and passed hurriedly on to Lady Fareham’s room. The door was still locked, but she would take no denial. “I must speak with you,” she said. CHAPTER XVII. THE MOTIVE—MURDER. For Lady Fareham and her sister September and October made a blank interval in the story of life—uneventful as the empty page at the end of a chapter. They spent those months at Fareham, a house which Hyacinth detested, a neighbourhood where she had never condescended to make friends. She condemned the local gentry as a collection of nobodies, and had never taken the trouble to please the three or four great families within a twenty-mile drive, because, though they had rank and consequence, they had not fashion. The _haut gout_ of Paris and London was wanting to them. Lord Fareham had insisted upon leaving London on the third of September, and had, his wife declared, out of pure malignity, taken his family to Fareham, a place she hated, rather than to Chilton, a place she loved, at least as much as any civilised mortal could love the country. Never, Hyacinth protested, had her husband been so sullen and ferocious. “He is not like an angry man,” she told Angela, “but like a wounded lion; and yet, since your goodness took all the blame of my unlucky escapade upon your shoulders, and he knows nothing of De Malfort’s insolent attempt to carry me off, I see no reason why he should have become such a gloomy savage.” She accepted her sister’s sacrifice with an amiable lightness. How could it harm Angela to be thought to have run out at midnight for a frolic rendezvous? The maids of honour had some such adventure half a dozen times in a season, and were found out, and laughed at, and laughed again, and wound up their tempestuous careers by marrying great noblemen. “If you can but get yourself talked about you may marry as high as you choose,” Lady Fareham told her sister.