The play was over, and her sister, who
doubtless had been among the audience, had not come home. Was she staying
at the palace, gossiping with the maids-of-honour, shining among that
brilliant, unscrupulous crowd, where intrigue was in the very air, where no
woman was credited with virtue, and every man was remorseless?
The anonymous letter scarcely influenced Angela's thoughts in these
agitated moments--that was but a foul assault on character by a foul-minded
woman. But the furtive confabulations of the past week must have had some
motive; and her sister's fluttered manner before leaving the house had
marked this night as the crisis of the plot.
Angela could imagine nothing but that ghostly masquerading which had, in
the first place, been discussed freely in her presence; and she could but
wonder that De Malfort and her sister should have made a mystery about a
plan which she had known in its inception. The more deeply she considered
all the circumstances, the more she inclined to suspect some evil intention
on De Malfort's part, of which Hyacinth, so frank, so shallow, might be too
easy a dupe.
"I do little good doubting and suspecting and wondering here," she said to
herself; and after hastily lighting the candles on her toilet-table, she
began to unlace the bodice of her light-coloured silk mantua, and in a few
minutes had changed her elegant evening attire for a dark cloth gown, short
in the skirt, and loose in the sleeves, which had been made for her to wear
upon the river.
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