The intervening lady Author:Edgar Jepson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE STIFFGATE BULL IT WAS some ten days before the Prime Minister had any reason to suspect that if Mr. Broome had gained by the recovery of Mic... more »hael, Stonorill had lost by his departure. He had kept the Lady Noggs busied with amusements of a kind which infringed no one's rights and brought no one discomfort. Left to herself she was hard put to it to fill the hours; and her ingenious mind was apt to find ways of filling them which her elders could regard with neither equanimity nor approbation. She was suffering, too, from a dim sense that fortune had been unkind to her in robbing her of the playmate she had so honorably acquired; and a letter, which taxed all Mr. Borrodaile's skill to decipher, from Michael at Margate, assuring her that he was having a splendid time, did not appease her. But the Prime Minister was, for the most part, kept by those around him in happy ignorance of the more strenuous portions of his niece's life; andit was not till the tenth morning after the departure of Michael that she came late to breakfast, to perceive on her uncle's face the expression of unhappy perplexity, so well known to her, which the revelation of some misdeed of hers always spread over it. The instant she perceived it she plunged firmly into talk about the quite impersonal matter of the weather. The Prime Minister gave but a half-hearted attention to her prophecies and suggestions about the atmospheric phenomena of the next ten hours, but she went firmly on till lack of breath gave her pause. Forthwith he seized his chance, and said: " I am very much displeased, Felicia, by a letter I have received about you from Colonel Stiff- gate " " From that horrid old fat man ? " cried the Lady Noggs. The look of pain on the Prime Minister's face grew acute; and ...« less