The viscount looked at him furiously. “I shall discuss this further with you,” said he. “The present is not the time nor place. But I shall know where to look for you.” “Leduc, I am sure, will always be pleased to see you. He, too, is studying manners.” Rotherby ignored the insult. “We shall see, then, whether you can do anything more than talk.” “I hope that your lordship, too, is master of other accomplishments. As a talker, I do not find you very gifted. But perhaps Leduc will be less exigent than I.” “Bah!” his lordship flung at him, and went out, cursing him profusely, Gaskell following at his master's heels. CHAPTER V. MOONSHINE My Lord Ostermore, though puzzled, entertained no tormenting anxiety on the score of the search to which Mr. Caryll was to be submitted. He assured himself from that gentleman's confident, easy manner--being a man who always drew from things the inference that was obvious--that either he carried no such letter as my lord expected, or else he had so disposed of it as to baffle search. So, for the moment, he dismissed the subject from his mind. With Hortensia he entered the parlor across the stone-flagged passage, to which the landlady ushered them, and turned whole-heartedly to the matter of his ward's elopement with his son. “Hortensia,” said he, when they were alone. “You have been foolish; very foolish.” He had a trick of repeating himself, conceiving, no doubt, that the commonplace achieves distinction by repetition. Hortensia sat in an arm-chair by the window, and sighed, looking out over the downs. “Do I not know it?” she cried, and the eyes which were averted from his lordship were charred with tears--tears of hot anger, shame and mortification. “God help all women!” she added bitterly, after a moment, as many another woman under similar and worse circumstances has cried before and since. A more feeling man might have conceived that this was a moment in which to leave her to herself and her own thoughts, and in that it is possible that a more feeling man had been mistaken. Ostermore, stolid and unimaginative, but not altogether without sympathy for his ward, of whom he was reasonably fond--as fond, no doubt, as it was his capacity to be for any other than himself--approached her and set a plump hand upon the back of her chair. “What was it drove you to this?” She turned upon him almost fiercely. “My Lady Ostermore,” she answered him.