Chapter XXVI.
Mrs Mackenzie of Cavendish Square

“My dear,” said the beautifully-dressed lady, “you don’t know me, I think;” and the beautifully-dressed lady came up to Miss Mackenzie very cordially, took her by the hand, smiled upon her, and seemed to be a very good-natured person indeed. Margaret told the lady that she did not know her, and at that moment was altogether at a loss to guess who the lady might be. The lady might be forty years of age, but was still handsome, and carried with her that easy, self-assured, well balanced manner, which, if it be not overdone, goes so far to make up for beauty, if beauty itself be wanting.

“I am your cousin, Mrs Mackenzie,—Clara Mackenzie. My husband is Walter Mackenzie, and his father is Sir Walter Mackenzie, of Incharrow. Now you will know all about me.”

“Oh, yes, I know you,” said Margaret.

“I ought, I suppose, to make ever so many apologies for not coming to you before; but I did call upon you, ever so long ago; I forget when, and after that you went to live at Littlebath. And then we heard of you as being with Lady Ball, and for some reason, which I don’t quite understand, it has always been supposed that Lady Ball and I were not to know each other. And now I have heard this wonderful story about your fortune, and about everything else, too, my dear; and it seems all very beautiful, and very romantic; and everybody says that you have behaved so well; and so, to make a long story short, I have come to find you out in your hermitage, and to claim cousinship, and all that sort of thing.”

“I’m sure I’m very much obliged to you, Mrs Mackenzie—”

“Don’t say it in that way, my dear, or else you’ll make me think you mean to turn a cold shoulder on me for not coming to you before.”

“Oh, no.”

“But we’ve only just come to town; and though of course I heard the story down in Scotland—”

“Did you?”

“Did I? Why, everybody is talking about it, and the newspapers have been full of it.”

“Oh, Mrs Mackenzie, that is so terrible.”

“But nobody has said a word against you. Even that stupid clergyman, who calls you the lamb, has not pretended to say that you were his lamb. We had the whole story of the Lion and the Lamb in the Inverary Interpreter, but I had no idea that it was you, then. But the long and the short of it is, that my husband says he must know his cousin; and to tell the truth, it was he that sent me; and we want you to come and stay with us in Cavendish Square till the lawsuit is over, and everything is settled.”

Margaret was so startled by the proposition, that she did not know how to answer it. Of course she was at first impressed with a strong idea of the impossibility of her complying with such a request, and was simply anxious to find some proper way of refusing it. The Incharrow Mackenzies were great people who saw much company, and it was, she thought, quite out of the question that she should go to their house. At no time of her career would she have been, as she conceived, fit to live with such grand persons; but at the present moment, when she grudged herself even a new pair of gloves out of the money remaining to her, while she was still looking forward to a future life passed as a nurse in a hospital, she felt that there would be an absolute unfitness in such a visit.