Lord Beaupre

MP3 Audio CD. Lord Beaupre

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SOME reference had been made to Northerley, which was within an easy drive, and Firminger described how he had dined there the night before and had found a lot of people. Mrs. Ashbury, one of the two visitors, inquired who these people might be, and he mentioned half a dozen names, among which was that of young Raddle, which had been a good deal on people's lips, and even in the newspapers, on the occasion, still re- cent, of his stepping into the fortune, exceptionally vast even as the product of a patent glue, left him by a father whose ugly name on all the vacant spaces of the world had exasperated generations of men. " Oh, is he there ?" asked Mrs. Ashbury, in a tone which might have been taken as a vocal rendering of the act of pricking up one's ears. She didn't hand on the infor- mation to her daughter, who was talking if a beauty of so few phrases could have been said to talk with Mary Gosselin, but in the course of a few moments she put down her teacup with a failure of suavity, . and, getting up, gave the girl a poke with her parasol. " Come, Maud, we must be stirring." "You pay us a very short visit," said Mrs. Gosselin, intensely demure over the fine web of her knitting. Mrs. Ashbury looked hard for an instant into her bland eyes, then she gave poor Maud another poke. She alluded to a reason and expressed re- grets ; but she got her daughter into motion, and Guy Firminger passed through the gar- den with the two ladies, to put them into their carriage. Mrs. Ashbury protested particularly against any further escort. While he was absent the other parent and child, sitting together on their pretty lawn in the yellow light of the August afternoon, talked of the frightful way Maud Ashbury had "gone off," and of something else as to which there was more to say when their third visitor came back. "Don't think me grossly inquisi