 also he had sacrificed more; he looked scientifically into the future: he
might have sacrificed a nameless more. And for what? he asked again. For the
favourable looks and tongues of these women whose looks and tongues he detested!
    »Dr. Middleton says he is indebted to me: I am deeply in his debt,« he
remarked.
    »It is we who are in your debt for a lovely romance, my dear Sir
Willoughby,« said Lady Busshe, incapable of taking a correction, so thoroughly
had he imbued her with his fiction, or with the belief that she had a good story
to circulate.
    Away she drove rattling her tongue to Lady Culmer.
    »A hat and horn, and she would be in the old figure of a post-boy on a
hue-and-cry sheet,« said Mrs. Mountstuart.
    Willoughby thanked the great lady for her services, and she complimented the
polished gentleman on his noble self-possession. But she complained at the same
time of being defrauded of her charmer Colonel De Craye since luncheon. An
absence of warmth in her compliment caused Willoughby to shrink and think the
wretched shirt he had got from the world no covering after all: a breath flapped
it.
    »He comes to me, to-morrow, I believe,« she said, reflecting on her superior
knowledge of facts in comparison with Lady Busshe, who would presently be
hearing of something novel, and exclaiming: »So, that is why you patronized the
colonel!« And it was nothing of the sort, for Mrs. Mountstuart could honestly
say she was not the woman to make a business of her pleasure.
    »Horace is an enviable fellow,« said Willoughby, wise in The Book, which
bids us ever, for an assuagement, to fancy our friend's condition worse than our
own, and recommends the deglutition of irony as the most balsamic for wounds in
the whole moral pharmacopoeia.
    »I don't know,« she replied with a marked accent of deliberation.
    »The colonel is to have you to himself to-morrow!«
    »I can't be sure of what I shall have in the colonel!«
    »Your perpetual sparkler?«
    Mrs. Mountstuart set her head in motion. She left the matter silent.
    »I'll come for him in the morning,« she said, and her carriage whirled her
off.
    Either she had guessed it, or Clara had confided to her the treacherous
passion of Horace De Craye!
    However, the world was shut away from Patterne for the night.
 

                                 Chapter XLVII
