The frost goes, but so does not St. John. He hunts all day, and all the
long evenings lounges sedulously on the sofa beside Constance, trying
to feel affectionate: trying to make her talk--trying, metaphorically,
to pull the string at his fine wax-doll's side, to make her say
"Pap-pa" and "Mam-ma" prettily. "Since I am to spend my life with this
woman," he says to himself, heavily, "I must try and make the best of
her."
And, alas! alas! the best is not very good. He is thirty now, and--the
Gerards are a long-lived, tough race--he may live till ninety. He
asks himself, now and then, in a sort of startled terror, is he to
see opposite him at breakfast, every day for the next sixty years,
this carven face, changeless as the stone saints on the walls of
Felton Church? Of all the one-half of creation, is this unsuggestive,
unresponsive, negative woman to be his sole portion? "It is her
misfortune that she is not a woman of science," as Mr. Shandy mildly
remarked of his wife, "but she _might_ ask a question." Strive as he
may against the conviction, the yoke that he has taken upon himself
in careless apathy has already begun to gall his withers. And yet
it was not (as you may imagine) _pique_ that first made Gerard Miss
Blessington's lover. It was partly that numb indifference as to
anything that might happen to him, that always follows a great blow,
partly sheer weariness of his father's importunities upon the subject
of his marriage.
He is the last scion of a family that has come down in direct male
line from a Norman robber: if it be tersely predicated of him on his
tombstone that he died S. P., the Hall, and the lake, and the wide fat
lands will go to some distant needy cousins, with whom Sir Thomas is
at dagger's drawing, and for whom he cherishes a hatred livelier even
than that which poachers, Irish beggars, and vulpecides inspire in his
gentle breast. The fact of his responsibilities has been chimed into
St. John's ears till he is rather weary of it: he has been hearing it
for the last five-and-twenty years--ever since indeed, that solemn day
when, petticoats being cast aside, he was invested with the virile
dignity of round jacket and breeches.
"Why don't we cut off the entail?" he asks impatiently, one day,
shortly after Esther's visit--a visit which has naturally given him a
greater distaste for the subject than he had ever before experienced.
"You and I together can do it, cannot we, Sir Thomas, and leave
the property to the Foundling, or Hanwell, or to some hospital or
penitentiary, where it would do a deal more good, I don't doubt, than
it ever has in our hands?" But he does not mean it; his pride in the
old house and the old name is as great, though not as offensively
shown, as his father's.
"It's all your cursed selfishness," says his parent, strutting and
fuming about, one morning, over the crimson and ash-coloured squares of
the library carpet; puffing out his feathers, as it were, and beginning
to gobble-obble. "You prefer your lazy, lounging club life, your French
chef, and d----d sybarite habits, to everything else under heaven;
you don't reflect that, when a man has been given such advantages as
yours, he owes corresponding duties to his country and his estate,
and--and--and his _father_----" concludes Sir Thomas, rather at a loss
for a peroration.
St. John lifts his eyebrows almost imperceptibly at the last clause.
"If you like to look out for a wife for me," he says, flinging
himself indolently into an arm-chair, and speaking half-seriously,
half-derisively, "and will engage to undertake all the bore of the
preliminaries--love-making, dancing attendance, etc.--I have no
objection to marrying, since the duty of continuing this illustrious
race has been perverse enough to devolve on me, who, God knows, am not
ambitious of perpetuating myself."
"Love-making!--pooh!" repeats Sir Thomas, contemptuously; "we need have
none of that rubbish; respect and esteem are a deal the best basis to
go upon; that's what your mother and I began life with----"
"And have continued undiminished up to the present day," says St.
John, with a slight sneer. "Well" (yawning), "if you can find, amongst
the wide range of your acquaintance, any young lady who is willing to
respect and esteem me--which is not likely--or to respect and esteem
Felton--which is more probable, and, after all, comes to much the same
in the end--she may have the felicity of being your daughter-in-law,
for all I shall do to hinder it: anything for a quiet life."
Sir Thomas turns his bright little fierce eyes sharply upon his
offspring, prepared, at a moment's notice, to precipitate himself into
one of his blustering, sputtering, God damning rages if he detect the
slightest sign of mirth or derision on the young man's face. But none
such is to be found; his downcast eyes are fixed with lazy interest
upon his own substantial legs, stretched in black-and-crimson-ribbed
stockings, straight before him. The ire of his parent's gaze is
mitigated. "If you are in earnest," he says, surlily, "and not
making a jest of this, as you mostly do of every serious subject,
why--why--there's no use in going far afield for what one has ready to
one's hand."
"Where?" asks St. John, thoroughly mystified by the Delphic obscurity
of his papa's remark, looking vaguely round the room, out on the
terrace, at the laughing, tumbling fountain, at the garden roller.
"Where?" repeats Sir Thomas, rather irritated at his son's obtuseness.
"Why, here! not five yards off! in this very house!" Then, seeing
him still look puzzled: "God bless my soul, sir! where are your wits
to-day? How can you do better than Conny? That bit of land of hers down
at Four Oaks dovetails into ours as neatly as possible; it seems as if
it were intended by Providence," ends Sir Thomas, piously.
St. John gives a long, low whistle. "Conny!" he repeats, in unfeigned
surprise. "I should as soon have thought of marrying my mother. Why, we
have been like brother and sister all our lives."
"Fiddlesticks!" says Sir Thomas, gruffly. "She is no more your sister
than I am. When I was young, if people were born brothers and sisters
they called themselves so, and if they were not they did not. I hate
your adopted brother and sister and father and motherhoods."
"Conny!" ejaculates St. John, again, reflectively.
The idea is thoroughly new, certainly, but it does not altogether
displease him.
He is thinking of her approvingly, as the one woman whom, above all
others, it would be impossible for him to love. After all, it is not
a wife for him that is required; God knows, he has no desire for such
an appendage; it is a mother for the heir to Felton that is wanted;
and for that purpose she will do as well as another--better than most,
indeed, being statelier, fairer, of better growth. If she can transmit
to her progeny her own straight features, instead of Sir Thomas's
bottle nose, or St. John's long nondescript one, so much the better for
them.
"Well?" says Sir Thomas, impatiently, strutting up and down, with his
hands under his green-coat tails.
"If she have no objection, neither have I; 'one woman is as good as
another, if not better,' as the Irishman said," answers the young man,
indifferently. "Well, Sir Thomas," rising and looking excessively
bored, "I suppose I may go now, mayn't I? I promised Bellew to go down
to the kennels with him, and as it is past twelve o'clock, I'm afraid
my bliss cannot well be consummated to-day."
He wants an heir, and she wants diamonds, and so the bargain is struck.
"She is good to look at, and she does not pretend to care two straws
about me--both causes for special thankfulness," he says to himself,
with a sort of sardonic philosophy, after his decisive interview with
his betrothed. "'On this day two years I married: Whom the Lord loveth
He chasteneth.' Will Byron's summary of wedded felicity be mine also?
Probably. I suppose one may think oneself tolerably lucky nowadays if
one steer clear of Sir James Wilde, and if one's children do not bear a
very striking resemblance to one's neighbour."
"And I know he's Mary's cousin;
For my firstborn son and heir
Much resembles that young guardsman,
With the selfsame curly hair."
Meanwhile Esther's little holiday is succeeded by no others; it remains
one green oasis, with well and palm-trees, among long stretches of
shifting, blinding, desert sand. Mr. Linley, indeed, has been to call,
and has been rewarded for his attention by a three-quarters-of-an-hour
_tête-à-tête_ with Mrs. Blessington. Esther is aware of his presence;
is visited, indeed, by a small and contemptible desire to go down and
chat with the young fellow; feels a weak craving for the touch of a
friendly hand, for the greeting of admiring eyes and courteous words.
But, being dimly conscious that the small acquaintance she has already
had with him has made Gerard conceive an even worse opinion of her than
he had before nourished, she restrains herself, in her great desire to
prove to him that she is not the insatiable greedy coquette he falsely
thinks her; and stays upstairs in the cold, in her great bare barrack,
curled up on the broad paintless window-seat, and vainly trying to
read "Pamela"--the hairbreadth escapes from RUIN (in big letters), in
the shape of a handsome and generous master, of that most austerely
virtuous and priggish of waiting-maids being one of the newest works of
fiction in the Blessington library.
And St. John hears of Linley's visit, and does not hear of Esther's
little self-abnegation; and, too proud to ask any questions about the
matter, pictures to himself soft _oeillades_, challenging smiles,
hand-pressures, under the purblind eyes of the old lady, and, so
picturing, eats his heart out with a dumb gnawing jealousy.
One evening, in one of her late lonely saunters (Miss Blessington never
accompanies her on her walks), Esther has strayed outside the park
paling into the road, lured by the splendour of a great holly-bush,
all afire with thousand clustered berries, amid the dark glister of
varnished leaves. Now, although having well understood (as
"Johnny and his sister Jane,
While walking down a shady lane,"
unfortunately for themselves, did not) that
"Fruit in lanes is seldom good,"
Esther has coveted those berries. Fond of bright colours as a child
or a savage, she has been wrestling obstinately with the stout
tough stems, and has come off ultimately victor, with only one very
considerable scratch, and several lesser ones on each bare hand. This
spoil, robbed from niggard winter, will make the old rat palace at home
so bravely, warmly gay. As she strolls slowly along, considering her
treasures, the sound of a trotting horse on the road behind her reaches
her ears. She turns, and sees a glimmer of scarlet flashing through the
misty light. Is it St. John coming back from hunting? If St. John have
a figure light and spare as a jockey's, have a large red moustache, and
a small questioning _retroussé_ face, this is he; if he have not, this
is not he.
"How de-do, Miss Craven?" says Linley, throwing himself off his horse,
and coming towards her with ready right hand heartily outstretched.
"Could not imagine who you were. I thought, perhaps, you were the
spirit of a departed Blessington, and as I am rather nervous, and
frightened out of my wits at ghosts, I had half a mind to turn and
flee."
"Only curiosity got the better of fear," she says, smiling up at him,
or rather down on him, through the steaming January evening; "you
thought I might prove human, after all?"
"Why did not you come and see me the other day when I came to call upon
you?" he asks, walking along beside her; "I believe you were at home
all the time." In his heart he does not in the least believe it.
She does not answer; but, without thinking of what she is doing, picks
off the berries, the procuring of which had cost her so many wounds,
and strews them along the road.
"Were you _really_ at home?" he repeats, a misgiving as to such having
been the case crossing his mind, and giving his vanity a slight prick.
"Yes, I was."
"And knew I was there all the time?"
"Yes."
"A prey to Mrs. Blessington----?"
"Yes."
"And never came to my rescue?"
"Did you expect the butler and housekeeper to come and entertain you?"
she asks, a little bitterly. "Have you forgotten what I told you the
other day--that I am Mrs. Blessington's _valet?_ I have as little
concern with her visitors as the kitchen-maids have."
"But I was not _her_ visitor," objects the young fellow, stoutly--"at
least" (laughing) "I _was_, but Heaven knows I did not mean to be!
However, 'God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,' and I obtained a
great deal of information gratis upon a subject on which I really never
had reflected as seriously as, it appears, I ought to have done----"
"Draughts and sandbags! I know what you are going to say," interrupts
Esther, breaking into a childish lighthearted laugh. "We do hear a
great deal about them; but I don't mind now; I'm used to it. I fall
into a sort of waking trance when the subject is first broached, and
say 'Yes' and 'No,' and 'H'm' and 'Oh,' at stated intervals; it does
just as well as listening all through."
Linley laughs too. He is always glad of an excuse for laughing. Life
has been to him as yet only laughable or smileable.
"Not a bad plan," ha says, commendingly; "but, really now, I flattered
myself I struck out one or two very original thoughts on the subject
of sash-windows; I said several rather brilliant things, only she did
not seem to see them. I hoped she would have found my conversation so
improving that she would have asked me to come again; but she did not
do anything of the kind."
"They never ask anybody to Blessington," says Esther, feeling the
string of her tongue loosed, and experiencing, despite herself, great
enjoyment in having some one to chatter to, at whom it is not necessary
to bawl, and who does not answer her monosyllabically with _fade_
chilly smiles. "They are too old to care for society; like Barzillai
the Gileadite, they cannot hear any more 'the voice of singing men
and singing women.' They have the clergyman and his wife to dine on
Christmas Day, and there their gaiety for the year begins and ends."
"And yours too?"
"And mine too. But I don't wish for gaiety," she answers, gravely, with
an involuntary glance at her crape, which has grown very brown, and
rusty, and shabby genteel.
"It must be an awful fate being shut up with those two old mummies,"
says Linley, compassionately, his pity for Miss Craven made vivid by
his personal recollections of Mrs. Blessington's conversational power.
"I had rather live in a lighthouse, or sweep a crossing, by long odds."
"So would I," she answers, drily, "if any one would set on foot a
subscription to buy me a broom."
"You have Miss Blessington now as a companion, at all events," rejoins
he, glad to fix on any bright spot in his poor new acquaintance's
mud-coloured life.
"Yes; she is pleasant to look at."
"And to talk to."
"She never talks."
"And Gerard? He is not particularly pleasant to look at, certainly----"
"Not particularly," she assents; feeling a hot glow steal all over her,
as at an insult to herself.
"But when he is not in one of his sulks, as he was the other day--do
you remember?--he is not a bad fellow, as fellows go."
"Isn't he?"
He looks at her with surprise. "Why, surely, living in the same house
with him, you ought to know him, at least as well as I do?"
"I never speak to him, and he never speaks to me," she answers, shortly.
Linley bursts out laughing. "Good heavens! what a horrible picture you
draw! You remind one of Mr. Watts's pretty little hymn--
"'Where'er I take my walks abroad
How many poor I see!
And as I never speaks to them
They never speak to me.'"
Esther laughs; but anyone listening might have heard a melancholy ring
in her merriment.
"Does _nobody_ speak to _anybody_ then at Blessington?" asks the young
man, aghast at the state of things as revealed by his companion's
answers.
"Mr. Blessington roars at Mrs. Blessington, and Mrs. Blessington roars
at Mr. Blessington, and I roar at them both."
"And the other two--do not they speak?"
"We are, none of us, much addicted to conversation," she answers,
grimly; "but, _en revanche_, what we do say we say very loud."
"Are you _all_ deaf, then?"
"No; but when one lives with deaf people, one gets into the habit
of thinking that the whole world is hard of hearing; one bawls at
everyone."
"What an exhausting process!" he says, with a shrug; "takes a great
deal out of you, doesn't it?"
"A good deal; lately, I have generally ended the day without any voice
at all. I don't mind making short remarks at the top of my voice, but
shouting out six columns of the _Times_, as is daily my pleasing task,
is rather fatiguing."
"How inhuman of them to allow you!" he cries, indignantly, looking
at the slender, fragile figure, at the childish face--so appealing,
so touching in its utter paleness, now that he sees it without the
temporary rose-flush of excitement.
"Not at all," she answers, simply; "they pay me for it."
"It would require very high pay to indemnify any one for the sacrifice
of the best years of their lives to those two old fossils; I thought
I was entitled to something considerable for standing the old woman
for three-quarters of an hour the other day without uttering a groan,"
answers the young man, more seriously than he generally takes the
trouble of saying anything.
"My pay is fifty pounds a year," she answers, frankly, "if you call
that high."
Fifty pounds! It would not find him in cigars. He has thrown away five
times that sum, before now, at lansquenet at one sitting.
Involuntarily his thoughts glance back over his own life--the
luxurious sybarite life in which, hitherto, the heaviest misfortunes
have been a too-prolonged frost, a disease among the grouse, the coming
in second at a steeplechase, or the pressure of a heavy helmet on his
forehead when on duty on a hot summer afternoon. Involuntarily, he
compares this life of his with the existence of the slight frail child
beside him: but the comparison is disagreeable, and so he stifles it,
as he always stifles, on principle, every painful thought, as a sin
against his religion of ease.
"Fifty pounds!--what a pittance!" he ejaculates.
"Do you think so?" she answers, surprised. "I think it is a good deal.
Considering that they find me in food and lodging, and that I do for
them only what any charity-school boy could do nearly as well, it is
surely enough."
Her companion differs widely in opinion from her, but
"When ignorance is bliss
'Tis folly to be wise;"
and reflecting that it is fortunate that she is satisfied, on whatever
insufficient grounds her satisfaction rests, he drops the subject, and
continues his catechism on a different head.
"Have you no amusement of any kind_--none?_"
"Oh dear, yes! We drive into Shelford every day in a close carriage,
with all the windows up."
"Terrific! And what do you do when you get there?"
"We come back again."
"And have you no visitors? Does no one ever come to call?"
"Yes; you came the other day."
"And am I a solitary instance of would-be sociability?"
"Not quite. Mr. Blessington gets into a panic about himself, sometimes,
and thinks that he is drawing near his latter end; and he bids us all
good-bye; and _he_ cries, and _we_ cry, and then Mr. Brand, the doctor,
comes and reassures us."
"I had no idea that there was anything the matter with the old
gentleman."
"No more there is. He has no more idea of dying _really_ than you have;
less, probably. You may break your neck out hunting, and he cannot
well break his out of his armchair. When a person has got into such a
confirmed habit of living as he has," she concludes, drily, "they find
it extremely difficult to break themselves of it."
He smiles.
"After all," she continues, thoughtfully, "since it is wear-and-tear
of mind, brain and heart-work, that drives people to the churchyard, I
don't see any reason why mere sleeping and eating machines should not
go on for ever."
It would be impossible to imagine a more innocent dialogue than the
foregoing, would not it? But the interlocutors have involuntarily
fallen into a very gentle saunter, as two people that, finding each
other's society agreeable, are in no haste to part. With his horse's
bridle carelessly thrown over his arm, a small muddy scarlet gentleman
strolls along with his face turned with interest towards his companion,
who is chattering away to him freely and readily--not as having any
particular partiality for him, but as being something young, friendly,
compassionate.
This is the picture--invested by twilight with an air of mystery that
it would not have worn in daylight--that salutes the eyes of a second
and larger scarlet gentleman, splashing home through the puddles on
a tired horse. As he passes them, Gerard (for it is he) pulls up his
horse into a walk, for he would not have the incivility to cover any
woman with dirt, even though the woman in question be a vile greedy
coquette, to whose insatiable vanity all men are meat. Then, raising
his hat stiffly, he rides on without speaking. As he trots homeward
through the dusk, the thought flashes into his writhing heart: "It was
an assignation! She arranged it with him on the day he came to call.
Damnable flirt! Is not she satisfied with _two_ ruined lives? Is she
fool enough to think that Linley will marry her? A nice time of night
for a respectable young woman to be out walking with a man she has only
seen twice in her life! And I heard her tell Mrs. Blessington the other
day that she never went outside the park-gates! Liar! What man was ever
deep enough to be up to a woman's tricks? She'll go to the dogs, as
sure as fate, if she is left to herself! Pshaw! I daresay she knows the
way there already. She is _so_ young; shall I warn her? Shall I speak
to her? Not I. Thank God, it is no business of mine!"
"Gerard!" says Linley, as, having passed them, he strikes into a brisk
trot--looking as if he were going to his own funeral, and just about to
join the _cortège_. "Certainly being in love don't improve him; he is
not half the fellow he was last season."
But Esther, in the moment of his passing them, had caught a glimpse of
the eager white anger of his face, and she hardly hears. "I'm afraid
Mr. Gerard thought it odd my being out so late," she says, trembling
with recollected fear of those altered, wrathful eyes.
"Well, and if he did?" cries Linley, impatiently.
"It _is_ very late," she says, looking round into the dusk; "it must
be, by the light. I never noticed how dark it has grown since you
overtook me."
"It is no darker than it was before Gerard passed us," he answers,
rather nettled.
"No, but--"
"Why, how scared you look!" he interrupts her. "You don't mean to say
you are _afraid_ of him?" (incredulously.) "If I were you, I don't
think I should pay much deference to the opinion of a person who, as
you say, never has the civility even to speak to you."
She is silent.
"It is the authority of his eye that awes you, I suppose?" says the
young man, vexed and sneering:--
"'An eye like Mars', to threaten and command.'
"_Threaten!_ Yes--I can testify to that!"
Hearing his words, Esther recovers her self-possession, and speaks
with some dignity: "You are quite wrong. Mr. Gerard's opinion has no
influence whatever on my sayings or doings; it would be very ridiculous
if it had. It was merely that his look of surprise reminded me of what
I ought to have recollected without reminding, that I _should_ have
been home an hour ago."
"Wanted again, I suppose?" says the young man, with the air of an
aggrieved person. "I wish you were not in quite such request; you are
always being wanted."
"There is a stile close here," says Esther, evidently in a hurry to be
off; "if I cross it, and make a short-cut across the park, I shall be
home twenty minutes sooner than if I went by the road. Good-bye."
"Good-bye," he says, reluctantly. "I'm not a bloodthirsty fellow
generally, but I wish that Gerard had broken his neck over that
bullfinch that he came to grief over to-day, before he had come poking
his ugly nose here, where nobody wanted him; at least I did not, and,
to judge by your face, neither did you. Well! when are we to meet
again, I wonder?"
"Never!--some time or other--soon!" answers Esther, hastily and
contradictorily, running up the gamut of adverbs in search of the one
most likely to obtain her release. Having gained that object, she jumps
over the stile, and disappears into a sea of mist.
Meanwhile St. John, having arrived at Blessington, and given up his
horse to a groom, enters the house; but the confinement of roof and
walls is insupportable to him. So he goes out again, and, walking up
the avenue, stations himself at the gate. There, resting his arms on
the topmost bar, he stands, straining his eyes down the road by which
he expects to see Esther and her companion make their appearance.
"They will defer their parting to the last moment--that is of course,"
he says to himself, in his lonely pain. "Well," taking out his watch
and minuting them, in order to drink the cup of his jealous misery to
the dregs, "it is not more than a mile and a half from here to the
place where I passed them; let us see how long a time they will manage
to be in doing the distance."
He has not long to wait. Before five minutes are over he hears the
sound of a horse's feet. "Linley must not see him watching them," he
thinks, with a sort of shame at himself, and so steps back into the
shade of a great tree.
Linley rides by _alone_. His face is turned towards the house, in whose
great black façade the lighted windows make oblong-shaped red glories;
his eyes are trying to fix upon Esther's casement. Of course he hits
upon the wrong one, and directs his sentimental gaze towards the
apartment where, with wig off and teeth out, Mrs. Blessington, aided by
her maid, is slowly moving through the stages of her dinner toilette.
"She must have taken the short-cut across the park," thinks Gerard,
with a sense of unwilling relief. "Afraid of my telling tales of her
escapade, I suppose."
He retraces his steps down the avenue, and, following a back road that
skirts the kitchen-garden, reaches another gate that leads into the
park, and there stands and waits again.
The short-cut has proved rather a long one. Part of the park has
been fenced off, to keep the deer and the Scotch cattle separate; a
gate which she had reckoned upon finding open, she discovers to be
padlocked, and has to make a long circuit round to another gate.
As she toils weary-footed through the wet grass, vague alarms assail
him that watches for her. Can any evil have come to her in the
darkness? Most improbably in that still, safe park. After a while, and
when his reasonless fears are beginning to gather more strongly about
his heart, he hears the sound as of some one running pantingly. Esther
is not so good at running as she was in the old Glan-yr-Afon days. She
has been flying along in hot haste, with a mixed fear of Scotch bulls
and goblins in pursuit. As she approaches the gate, Gerard opens it for
her. Seeing it swing open without any apparent cause, she gives a great
nervous start; then, discovering the motive cause of the phenomenon,
drops into a walk.
"It is rather late, Mr. Gerard, I'm afraid, isn't it so?" she asks,
with some hesitation at this disobedience to his command of silence.
And yet, surely, if he had meant not to speak to her, he would not have
come thither.
Two speech-gifted human beings could hardly be expected to meet with
less civility than two pigs, who would at least exchange a grunt.
He looks at his watch again. "It is ten minutes to six," he replies
with punctilious politeness.
"Is it _really?_ I had no idea how the time went," she says,
apologetically, "until your look of--of--_surprise_ reminded me."
The line of defence she has hit upon is unlucky.
"Really!" he answers, stiffly.
"I had not noticed how the light had gone, nor anything about the
matter," she continues, innocently, floundering at every word into
deeper disgrace.
"I daresay not," he replies, freezingly.
She had addressed him, penitent and humble, willing to take a scolding
in all submissiveness, but the chill brevity of his answers turns her
meekness to gall.
"When one is in pleasant company," she remarks, with a rather
hysterical laugh, "one forgets the flight of time."
"Undoubtedly," replies Gerard, endeavouring to conceal his anger under
an appearance of calmness, and unable to manage more than one word at a
time.
"If one has not taken a vow of perpetual silence, it is a great relief
to have a little conversation with a person who is neither _deaf_ nor
_dumb_," she says, emboldened by exasperation.
"An immense relief, no doubt," he answers, in deep displeasure.
"And yet, if you will allow me," he continues, unable to resist the
temptation to lecture her--"who am so much older than you, and can have
no interest in the matter but your own advantage--to give an opinion, I
should recommend your choosing a fitter time of day for your meetings,
even with so desirable and congenial a companion as Mr. Linley."
"Beggars must not be choosers," she answers, sulkily. "You seem to
forget how very small a portion of the day I have at my own disposal."
He draws himself up to his full height, and a stern expression makes
his lip thin. "I was right," he says internally; "it was no accident!"
Then aloud: "I apologise, Miss Craven, for interfering in your affairs,
in which, God knows, I have small concern. I only thought that, as you
are so young, you might not be aware that _nocturnal_ walks with a man
of Linley's character are not advantageous to any woman's reputation."
"I know nothing about his character," retorts she, defiantly; "I
daresay it is as good as other people's. All I know is, that he is
very kind and civil to me, which is what nobody else is nowadays."
Then, to avoid the disgrace of seeming to court his compassion
by tears, she darts from his side, and rushes to that harbour of
refuge--her great, bare sleeping-chamber.