The clock struck the hour.  Almost at the same moment the boudoir-door opened, and Robert Moody, released at last from attendance on Tommie, entered the drawing-room.

CHAPTER V.

“Well?” asked Isabel eagerly, “what does Mr. Hardyman say?  Does he think he can cure Tommie?”

Moody answered a little coldly and stiffly.  His dark, deeply-set eyes rested on Isabel with an uneasy look.

“Mr. Hardyman seems to understand animals,” he said.  “He lifted the dog’s eyelid and looked at his eyes, and then he told us the bath was useless.”

“Go on!” said Isabel impatiently.  “He did something, I suppose, besides telling you that the bath was useless?”

“He took a knife out of his pocket, with a lancet in it.”

Isabel clasped her hands with a faint cry of horror.  “Oh, Mr. Moody! did he hurt Tommie?”

“Hurt him?” Moody repeated, indignant at the interest which she felt in the animal, and the indifference which she exhibited towards the man (as represented by himself).  “Hurt him, indeed!  Mr. Hardyman bled the brute—­”

“Brute?” Isabel reiterated, with flashing eyes.  “I know some people, Mr. Moody, who really deserve to be called by that horrid word.  If you can’t say ‘Tommie,’ when you speak of him in my presence, be so good as to say ‘the dog.’”

Moody yielded with the worst possible grace.  “Oh, very well!  Mr. Hardyman bled the dog, and brought him to his senses directly.  I am charged to tell you—­” He stopped, as if the message which he was instructed to deliver was in the last degree distasteful to him.

“Well, what were you charged to tell me?”

“I was to say that Mr. Hardyman will give you instructions how to treat the dog for the future.”

Isabel hastened to the door, eager to receive her instructions.  Moody stopped her before she could open it.

“You are in a great hurry to get to Mr. Hardyman,” he remarked.

Isabel looked back at him in surprise.  “You said just now that Mr. Hardyman was waiting to tell me how to nurse Tommie.”

“Let him wait,” Moody rejoined sternly.  “When I left him, he was sufficiently occupied in expressing his favorable opinion of you to her Ladyship.”

The steward’s pale face turned paler still as he said those words.  With the arrival of Isabel in Lady Lydiard’s house “his time had come”—­exactly as the women in the servants’ hall had predicted.  At last the impenetrable man felt the influence of the sex; at last he knew the passion of love misplaced, ill-starred, hopeless love, for a woman who was young enough to be his child.  He had already spoken to Isabel more than once in terms which told his secret plainly enough.  But the smouldering fire of jealousy in the man, fanned into flame by Hardyman, now showed itself for the first time.  His looks, even more than his words, would have warned a woman with any knowledge of the natures of men to be careful how she answered him.  Young, giddy, and inexperienced, Isabel followed the flippant impulse of the moment, without a thought of the consequences.  “I’m sure it’s very kind of Mr. Hardyman to speak favorably of me,” she said, with a pert little laugh.  “I hope you are not jealous of him, Mr. Moody?”