"Most assuredly."

She laughed again--a bitter, mirthless laugh.

"We go fast, my friend! And you have hardly known this divinity
four-and-twenty hours."

"Love is not a plant of slow growth. Like Jonah's gourd, it springs
up, fully matured, in an hour."

"Does it? My son is better versed in amatory floriculture than I am.
But before you ask Miss Hunsden to become Lady Kingsland, had you not
better inquire who her mother was?"

The baronet thought of the letter, and turned very pale.

"Her mother? I do not understand. What of her mother?"

"Only this"--Lady Kingsland arose as she spoke, her face deathly white,
her pale eyes glittering--"the mother is a myth and a mystery. Report
says Captain Hunsden was married in America--no one knows where--and
America is a wide place. No one ever saw the wife; no one ever heard
Miss Hunsden speak of her mother; no one ever heard of that mother's
death. I leave Sir Everard Kingsland to draw his own inferences."

She swept from the room with a mighty rustle of silk. A dark figure
crouching on the rug, with its ear to the keyhole, barely had time to
whisk behind a tall Indian cabinet as the door opened.