Barker was astounded, dismayed, even terror-stricken. Mrs. Horncastle
crying! Mrs. Horncastle, the imperious, the collected, the coldly
critical, the cynical, smiling woman of the world, actually crying!
Other women might cry--Kitty had cried often--but Mrs. Horncastle!
Yet, there she was, sobbing; actually sobbing like a schoolgirl,
her beautiful shoulders rising and falling with her grief; crying
unmistakably through her long white fingers, through a lace
pocket-handkerchief which she had hurriedly produced and shaken from
behind her like a conjurer's trick; her beautiful eyes a thousand times
more lustrous for the sparkling beads that brimmed her lashes and welled
over like the pool before her.
"Don't mind me," she murmured behind her handkerchief. "It's very
foolish, I know. I was nervous--worried, I suppose; I'll be better in a
moment. Don't notice me, please."
But Barker had drawn beside her and was trying, after the fashion of his
sex, to take her handkerchief away in apparently the firm belief that
this action would stop her tears. "But tell me what it is. Do Mrs.
Horncastle, please," he pleaded in his boyish fashion. "Is it anything I
can do? Only say the word; only tell me SOMETHING!"
But he had succeeded in partially removing the handkerchief, and so
caught a glimpse of her wet eyes, in which a faint smile struggled out
like sunshine through rain.
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