Hubert admitted knowledge of the facts, and
made the remark about the valley of Wanley which Mrs. Boscobel
repeated at Exmouth, but he revealed nothing more. Having no
marriageable daughter, Mrs. Boscobel was under no necessity of
searching into his antecedents. He was one of ten or a dozen young
men of possible future whom she liked to have about her.
Hubert seated himself by Adela, and there was a moment of inevitable
silence.
'I saw you as soon as I got into the room,' he said, in the
desperate necessity for speech of some kind. 'I thought I must have
been mistaken; I was so unprepared to meet you here.'
Adela replied that she was staying with Mrs. Westlake.
'I don't know her,' said Hubert, 'and am very anxious to Boscobel's
portrait of her--I saw it in the studio just before it went
away--was a wonderful thing.'
This was necessarily said in a low tone; it seemed to establish
confidence between them.
Adela experienced a sudden and strange calm; in a world so entirely
new to her, was it not to be expected that things would happen of
which she had never dreamt? The tremor with which she had faced this
her first evening in general society had allayed itself almost as
soon as she entered the room, giving place to a kind of pleasure for
which she was not at all prepared, a pleasure inconsistent with the
mood which governed her life.
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