She rather liked
her mistress, but watched her in the interests of Lady Bellair.
She had a fancy for the earl, a natural dislike for Malcolm which
she concealed in distant politeness, and for all the rest of the
house, indifference. As to her person, she had a neat oval face,
thin and sallow, in expression subacid; a lithe, rather graceful
figure, and hands too long, with fingers almost too tapering--of
which hands and fingers she was very careful, contemplating them
in secret with a regard amounting almost to reverence: they were
her sole witnesses to a descent in which she believed, but of which
she had no other shadow of proof.
Caley's face, then, with its unsaintly illumination, gave Malcolm
something to think about as he sat there upon Honour, the new horse.
Clearly she had had a triumph: what could it be? The nature of the
woman was not altogether unknown to him even from the first, and
he could not for months go on meeting her occasionally in passages
and on stairs without learning to understand his own instinctive
dislike: it was plain the triumph was not in good. It was plain
too that it was in something which had that very moment occurred,
and could hardly have to do with anyone but her mistress. Then her
being in that room revealed more. They would never have sent her
out of the study, and so put themselves in her power.
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