Now yesterday, when Norah met Mrs Keeling in the porch, the latter had been so very normal{186} and condescending that she had scarcely given another thought to the encounter. Mrs Keeling had often met her coming or going to her work, and had always a word for her even as she had had yesterday. But instantly now, when Keeling expressed a wish that she should go there this morning, she connected it in her mind with that meeting.
Want More Icons Free ? Checkout fontawesome website and use any icon Click Here.
CHAPTER XXV.The dark eyes grew more caressing. A more vain man would have been flattered. To be the husband of Countess Lalage meant much, to be master of all this wealth and splendour meant more. But the quiet elation in Bruce's tones was not for the Countess, if she only knew it.She had been working that day at the table in his big room and stood there tidying it. Then she went back into the small room adjoining, and he heard her rustle into her mackintosh. Then returning she stood at the door of it a moment and from underneath his half raised eyes, he saw that she looked slowly all round his room, as if, perhaps, searching for something, or as if rather committing it to her memory. Then without another word to him she went out, and he heard her steps tapping along the cement-floored corridor to the lift. Once they paused, and he half-longed, half-dreaded that she was coming back. They began again, and stopped, and immediately afterwards he heard the clang of the grille, and the faint rumble of the descending lift. He had one overpowering impulse that brought him to his feet, to dash downstairs, and see her go out, or if she was gone already to follow her into the street, just for the sake of setting eyes on her once more, but it took him no further than that, and presently he sat down again.She sat down in one of the big chairs that Keeling had brought in. That was the purpose for which he had fetched them, but for the moment he put on his employer-spectacles again to observe the unusual sight of his secretary sitting unbidden while he stood. Then the girls complete and unconscious certainty that she knew how to behave herself, whisked them from in front of his eyes again, and he saw only his guest sitting there, to whom were due his powers of entertaining and interesting her.
