Page 30 of A Lesson in Forbidden Love

“Miss Wharton.”

“Lady Sophia.”

“He looked at you in a not nice way.”

“Lady Sophia.”

“He did. I saw. He looked at you the way the butcher’s boy looks at the parlourmaid when he thinks Hodges isn’t watching.”

“Lady Sophia, that is not — “

“It is what I saw, Miss Wharton.”

Madeleine did sit down then.

She sat down at the schoolroom table opposite Lady Sophia, and she folded her hands on the wood, and she said, in the steadiest voice she had:

“It is not a thing that a young lady remarks upon.”

“Even if it is true?”

“Even if it is true.”

“That is a silly rule.”

“It is a rule, all the same.”

Lady Sophia considered this. She considered it with the grave concentration she gave to a thing that did not, in itself, persuade her, but which came from a person she had decided to trust. Then she nodded, once, and picked up The Vicar of Wakefield, and found her place, and went on.

“ ‘As she had no patience for cookery books —’ ”

“Patience. That is better. Your enunciation has improved.”

“ ‘— she made the cooks of her acquaintance afford her their best receipts, and she compiled them, in a fair hand, into a book of her own —’ ”

Madeleine listened.

She corrected, once, a small slurring of a vowel. She marked, with her pencil, a line in the margin of her exercise book that was not, strictly speaking, a mark for The Vicar of Wakefield.

Below her, in the square, a carriage drew off and turned the corner into Brook Street; and a gentleman in a beautifully cut coat, who had spent the last quarter of an hour engaged in a perfectly idle conversation with his cousin and the Dowager Marchioness of Greyscarp about the weather and a box at the opera, sat back against the squabs and looked out of the window at the pale April sky, and smiled — the private smile, of a man who had come to a house upon one errand and had come away with another, quite unlooked for, and considerably more diverting.

He did not mention it to Lady Honoria. He did not mean to mention it to anyone, yet.

A piece of intelligence of that kind was not a thing one spent at once.

One kept it, like a loaded pistol in a drawer, against the afternoon one had use for it.

He thought, in the meanwhile, that he would call again.

Three flights up, in a schoolroom which caught the north light, Madeleine heard the carriage turn the corner, and did not go to the window to watch it go.

Chapter Seven

She did not go to the window to watch it go, but she stood at the schoolroom table for a long while after the wheels had ceased to be audible, with her hand on the back of Lady Sophia’s chair.

She made herself complete, in her head, the dull inventory of what must be done before the afternoon was out: the French exercise, set; the page of the Vicar marked; Lady Sophia’s hair, which had come undone again, plaited; the writing slope put away; the inkstand stoppered. It was a list a Governess could finish without thinking, which was why she made it.

Thought, at this moment, was the thing she could least afford.