"You must let me put you up, I think," says Gerard bending down and looking into his companion's great, sweet eyes, under the rim of her battered, intoxicating-looking hat.
"Must I?" (lowering her eyelids shyly.)
"Yes; do you mind much?"
"No – o."
He stoops and lifts her gently. He is not a Samson or a prize-fighter, and well grown young women of seventeen are not generally feather-weights; but yet it seems to him that the second occupied in raising her from the ground and placing her in the saddle was shorter than other seconds.
A man's arms are not sticks or bits of iron, that they can hold a beautiful woman without feeling it. St. John's blood is giving little quick throbs of pleasure. His arms seem to feel the pressure of that pleasant burden long after they have been emptied of it.
"I think you must let me hold you," he says, gently and very respectfully passing his arm round her waist.
"No, no!" she cries, hastily, pulling herself away – "no need! – no need at all! I shall not fall."
She feels an overpowering shrinking from the enforced, unavoidable familiarity. It does not arise from any distaste for St. John certainly, nor yet from any quixotic loyalty to Bob; it springs from a new, unknown, uncomprehended shyness.
"Very well," he answers, quietly, releasing her instantly, and taking the bridle in his hand. "But I'm afraid you will find that you are mistaken."
They set forward across the park, at a foot's pace and in silence. Esther twists her hands in the cob's mane, and tries to persuade herself that pommelless pigskin does not make a slippery seat. Every two paces she slides down an inch or so, and then recovers herself with an awkward jerk. The sun is hot. Now and then, as the cob puts his foot on a mole-hill, or some other slight inequality in the ground, her ankle bumps against the saddle-flap. She feels turning giddy and sick with the heat and the pain.
"Mr. Gerard! Mr. Gerard! I'm falling!" she calls out loud, stretching out her arms to him, and clutching hold of his shoulder with a violence and tenacity that she herself is not in the least aware of.
He is magnanimous. He does not exult over her; he does not say, "I knew how it would be; I told you so!" He only says, in a kind, anxious voice, and plainlier still with kind, anxious eyes, "I'm afraid you are in great pain?" and replaces the rejected arm in its former obnoxious position.
As they enter the lodge gate, they see Sir Thomas and his ward advancing down the avenue towards them. Miss Blessington is a great favourite of Sir Thomas's. She is good to look at, and hardly ever speaks; or, if she does, it is only to say, "Yea, yea, and Nay, nay."
"Now for an exchange of civilities," says Gerard, rather bitterly; "even at this distance I can see him getting the steam up."
"Miss Craven has had a fall, Sir Thomas, and hurt herself," he remarks, explanatorily, as soon as the two parties come within speaking distance.
"Broken the mare's knees, I suppose?" cries Sir Thomas, loudly, taking no notice whatever of Miss Craven's casualties. "Some fool's play, of course; larking over the palings, I dare say. Well, sir, what have you done with her? where have you left her? out with it!" (lashing himself up into an irrational turkeycock fury.)
"Damn the mare!" answered St. John in a rage, growing rather white, and forgetting his manners.
St. John's rages, when he does get into them, which is not very often, are far worse ones than his papa's, and so the latter knows, and is cowed by the first symptoms of the approach of one.
Miss Blessington looks up shocked. This jeune personne bien élevée always is shocked at whatever people ought to be shocked at – Colenso, Swinburne, skittles, &c.
"You are not much hurt, really, I hope?" she says, suavely, walking along beside Esther, while Sir Thomas and his heir wrangle in the background. "Which way did you come, and what has become of your horse?"
"We came through the park," answers Esther, holding on by her eyelids to the cob's slippery back; "so I suppose the horse is there still. Mr. Gerard tried to catch it, and could not."
"Through the park!" repeats Miss Blessington, with a slight smile of superior intelligence. "Oh! I see; a short cut home! Poor St. John has such a horror of taking a ride for riding's sake, that he always tries to shorten his penance as much as possible!"
CHAPTER XI
It is the 1st of September, and the seal of impending destruction is set upon many a little plump brown bird; but ignorance is bliss, and the little brown birds do not know it, and are walking about the turnip ridges and amongst the stubble fields as confidently as if there were no such man as Purdey, and no such infernal machine as a gun. St. John and his papa go out shooting together. Sir Thomas knocks up by luncheon time, and returns to his orchid-house, and to the goading the bricklayers, as King Agamemnon did his fellow-chiefs, with bitter words. Esther spends the day in her bedroom, lying in state on a sofa with her ankle bandaged up. It hurts her acutely if she attempts to walk on it; but if she keeps quiet, she is hardly aware of there being anything wrong with it. It is very annoying having to play the invalid for an ailment that is purely local when you feel in riotous health and spirits – to have your dinner sent up to you on a tray when you are so hungry that you could eat double your allotted portion, if it were not that, being an invalid, you are ashamed to say so. One has a sense of shamming, malingering.
Poor Miss Craven passes a very dull day; the red rose on one side the window, and the travellers' joy on the other, look in and say, "Why is this lazy child lying all day on a couch, when we and so many other flowers have been calling to her with our voiceless voices to come out into the breeze and shine?" A bee comes in sometimes, and goes buzz – buzzing about, telling himself how busy he is, and that he has no time to waste now that his honey-harvest is drawing so near to its sweet close. The room is so still that, but for feeling intensely alive, and not having her chin tied up, Esther might almost imagine herself laid out previous to her interment. Now and again Miss Blessington enters noiselessly, says "I hope you are feeling a little easier," in her soft monotone, and then rustles gently away again. She has provided Esther with a novel and a book of acrostics, and thinks she has done her duty by her neighbour amply. The novel is one written with a purpose; a dull one-sided tilt against Ritualism. Esther never found out an acrostic in her life, and has seldom been so completely vacant of employment as to try. She is, therefore, reduced to spending half the day in writing to Bob – half the day! and yet when the letter is finished it only covers three sides of a sheet. She has written, rewritten, and re-rewritten it. All around and about her lie half-covered, quarter-covered, whole-covered sheets, all stamped with the seal of condemnation. Gerard is the stumbling block; his name either will not come in at all, which looks unnatural, or else insists on thrusting itself in every second line. This is the form in which Miss Craven's billetdoux finally presents itself at Plas Berwyn:
"Dear Bob, – Thanks very much for your letter; please put a few stops next time. I had a very disagreeable journey here – bushels of dust and a sick baby. This is a very handsome place, and they are all very kind to me. (H'm! are they? I don't know about that; one of them is.) Yesterday I went out riding with Sir Thomas and his ward (so I did; I set out with them), and I stupidly fell from my horse, a sort of thing that nobody but I would have done, and hurt my foot a little; but nothing to speak of. Miss Blessington, the ward, is remarkably handsome, but looks a great deal older than I do. My love to your mother, and thanks for her kind messages; the same to the girls. Tell Bessy that it is hardly worth while sending me 'The Sinfulness of Little Sins,' as I shall have more time for reading when I get home again.
"Yours affectionately,"E. C.
"P. S. – Mr. Gerard is not at all good-looking; he seems very fond of shooting; he has been out all to-day."
"The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs."
Dinner is over; nothing to look forward to but bed-time. Yah! How dull! A knock comes at the door. Miss Blessington enters with flowers in her hand – jessamine, heliotrope, everything that smells sweetly and not heavily – unlike Bob's well meaning but annihilating double stocks.
"I hope you are in less pain now" (the usual formula, that comes as regularly and frequently as the doxology in church).
"Oh yes! thanks; I'm very well" (yawning and looking woefully bored.) "What lovely flowers!"
"St. John sent them to you" (rather shortly).
"Mr. Gerard?" (with animation, the bored look vanishing.) "How very kind of him!"
"He always is so good-natured," answers Constance, with a cold generality.
"It is so particularly kind of him, when he has such an overpowering aversion for strangers," continues Essie, with a malicious twinkle in her eyes.
Constance sweeps to the window, slightly discomfited.
"He told me to ask you whether you would like him to come and carry you downstairs for an hour or two?" she says, in a somewhat constrained voice; "but I daresay you would rather be left in peace up here; and I should think that the quieter you kept your foot the better for it."
"On the contrary, I should like it of all things," cries Essie, with perverse alacrity. "In your cheerful company downstairs, I shall be more likely to forget my sufferings, such as they are, than all by my dull self up here; to tell the truth, I was meditating asking your maid to come and talk to me about haberdashery."
Outside Miss Craven's door St. John pauses, as one that is devout hesitates on the threshold of a sanctuary. Chintz curtains rose-lined, white-dressed toilet-table, simple valueless ornaments lying about, two little slippers, that look as if they had been just kicked off – his eye takes in all the details. He feels like Faust in Marguerite's chamber. And Marguerite herself, lying careless, restful on her couch, her two arms flung lazily upwards and backwards, to make a resting-place for her head; the smooth elbows and shoulders gleaming warm, cream-white, through the colder blue-white of her dress; and the up-looking face, childish in its roundness, and blooming down – but oh! most womanish – in the shafts of quick fire that greet him from the laughing, sleepy eyes. Where did she learn that art of shooting? From the pigs and cabbages at Glan-yr-Afon? From old Mrs. Brandon? From Miss Bessie? From – "Stop the Leak?" Deponent sayeth not whence.
"How good of you!" she says, with emphasis, stretching out her hand to him, as he stands beside her sofa, looking rather fagged with his day's work. "I had just been calculating how many hours there would be before I could have a decent pretext for going to bed; one gets so tired of oneself."
"Not so tired as one does of one's family," answers St. John, rather ruefully.
"I have no family," she rejoins, simply.
"We Gerards have a particularly happy knack of rubbing each other the wrong way," he says, rather irritably. "I am sometimes tempted to think that we are the most unamiable family God ever put breath into."
"People always think that of their own family," answers Essie, laughing; "they know their own little crookednesses much better than any one else's."
"Has Miss Craven changed her mind, St. John?" asks Miss Blessington from the doorway.
St. John starts. "Not that I know of."
He stoops, and lifts her carefully, as a thing most precious; as he does so, a little foolish trembling passes over her, as a baby-breeze passes over some still pool's breast, hardly troubling the sky and the trees that lie far down in the blue mirror. Down the grand staircase he bears her, and Constance follows to see that there is no loitering by the way.
The morning-room at Felton (so called because the family always sit there in the evenings) is very lofty. You have to crane your neck up to see the stucco stalactites, faintly imitative of Staffa and Iona, pendant from the ceiling. There are statuettes in plenty standing about in niches and on pedestals. Venuses and Minervas and Clyties, all with their hair very elaborately dressed, and not a stitch of clothes on. There is a great litter of papers and magazines on the round table: the Justice of the Peace, that is Sir Thomas's; the Field, that is St. John's; the Cornhill, that is everybody's. Sir Thomas and miladi are playing backgammon; miladi is compelled to do so every night as a penance for her sins – four rubbers, and if he wins, as she prays and endeavours that he may, five.
"Don't take the dice up in such a hurry, miladi," he says, snappishly; "how the deuce can I see what your throw is?"
"Seizes, Sir Thomas," responds miladi, meekly.
"Seizes! don't believe a word of it! much more like seize ace!"
Miss Blessington, dressed by Elise in Chambéry gauze, and by Nature in her usual panoply of beautiful stupidity, which she wears sleeping and waking, at home and abroad, living and dying, is at work at a little table, a nude Dian, with cold, chaste smile and crinkly hair, on a red velvet shrine just above her head.
"Do they play every evening?" asks Esther, from the recess where she has been deposited by St. John, whose eyes she encounters, considering her attentively over the top of the Saturday. Shams, Flunkeyism, Woman's Rights, Dr. Cumming, the Girl of the Period – they have all been passing through his eye into his brain, and, mixed with Esther Craven, make a fine jumble there.
St. John has been rather unlucky in his experiences of women hitherto. He has got rather into the habit of thinking that all good women must be stupid, and that all pleasant women must be bad. Esther is not stupid. Is she bad, then? Those glances of hers, they give a man odd sensations about the midriff; they inspire in him a greedy, covetous desire for more of them; but are they such as Una would have given her Red Cross Knight? Are they such as a man would like to see his wife bestow on his men friends? The wilder a man is or has been himself, the more scrupulously fastidious he is about the almost prudish nicety of the women that belong to him. He likes to see the sheep and the goats as plainly, widely separated as they are in the parable; it moves him to deep wrath when he sees a good woman faintly, poorly imitating a bad one. I do not think that good women believe this half generally enough; or, if they do, they do not act upon it.
"Do they play every evening?"
"Every evening, and Sir Thomas always accuses my mother of cheating."
"And you, what do you do?"
"Read, go to sleep, play cribbage or bézique with Conny."
"Does she live here always?"
"Always."
"You and she are inseparable, I suppose?"
"We get on very well in a quiet way; she is a very good girl, and comes and sits in my smoking-room by the hour with me."
"Wrong, but pleasant, as the monkey said when he kissed the cat," remarks Esther, flippantly. "You are very fond of her, I suppose?"
"H'm!" shrugging his shoulders. "I have a cat-like propensity for getting fond of anything that I live and eat and breathe with – like the fellow in the Bastille, don't you know, that got so fond of a spider. I never should have grown fond of a spider, though; they have got such a monstrous lot of long legs; but the principle is the same."
"Why are not you fond of Sir Thomas then?"
"So I am, I suppose, in a way; if he were to tumble into the pool, I suppose I should hop in and fish him out again; I'm not quite sure about that, either."
"We'll have another rubber, miladi?" shouts Sir Thomas's stentor voice, elate with victory; "that is the ninth game I have beat you to-night; you'll never win as long as you leave so many blots – I have told you so a score of times."
Poor miladi, strangling a gigantic yawn, begins to set her men again; she had hoped that her punishment was ended for the night, and that she might be dismissed to the otium cum dignitate of her armchair and nap.
St. John jumps up and walks over to the players; there are few things in life he hates so much as playing backgammon with his father, but he hates seeing his mother bullied even more. If a man is cursed with a necessity for loving something, the chances are that he will love his mother, even if she bear more resemblance to a porpoise than to a Christian lady.
"I'll have a rubber with you, Sir Thomas; my mother is tired."
"Fiddlesticks!" growls Sir Thomas. "Tired! what the devil has she been doing to tire herself? – fiddle-faddled about the garden, picking off half a dozen dead roses. Very good thing for her if she is."
But the man's will is stronger than the turkey-cock's, and the latter yields.
CHAPTER XII
A sprained ankle takes mostly a tedious weary time in getting mended. Esther's, however, is but a slight sprain, and entails only a week's lying on a thoroughly comfortable, well-stuffed sofa close to one of the library's windows, where mignonette sends up continual presents of the strongest and sweetest of all flower-perfumes to her grateful nostrils – entails also being made a fuss with. If Miss Blessington had had her will, the sofa would have been upstairs, and the being made a fuss with, save by a compassionate lady's maid, dispensed with. Miss Blessington desires sincerely, in her affectionate solicitude for her welfare, to keep the young patient in a graceful and pleasing solitude upstairs. The young patient, being of a gregarious turn of mind, desires sincerely to be brought down: and the son of the house, although not particularly young, and in general not particularly gregarious, desires sincerely to bring her down. It is a case of Pull, Devil; Pull, Baker! – Baker being represented by Constance, Devil by St. John and Esther. But two pull stronger than one, and they gain their point.
"Is Miss Craven ready to come down?" asks St. John, one morning, addressing the question to Miss Blessington as they stand together after breakfast.
"I don't know, I'm sure. St. John?"
"Well!"
"If," she says, giving a little factitious cough, and speaking with her usual amiable smile, "it is any object to Miss Craven to get well – "
"I should imagine that there could be no doubt on that point," he answers, picking up the Pall Mall.
"I don't know," she rejoins, with a certain air of doubtful reserve.
"It is generally considered pleasanter to have two legs to go upon than one, isn't it? It is not many people that, like Cleopatra, can 'hop forty paces through the public streets.' Have you any reason for imputing to Miss Craven a morbid taste for invalidhood?"
"No; but she is hardly an invalid, and to be made so much of as you, with your usual good-nature to the waifs and strays of humanity, make of her, must be a sensation as pleasant as novel."
"I am wonderfully good-natured, aren't I?" he says, laughing broadly to himself behind the little yellowy sheets of the Pall Mall. "There is not one man in a hundred that, in my place, would do the same, is there?"
She is silent; the resentment of a slow nature, that has a suspicion of being laughed at, but is not sure of it, smouldering within her.
"Come, Conny, you began a sentence just now which you left unfinished, like a pig with one ear. 'If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well' – what then?"
"If it is really an object to Miss Craven to get well, I should think that she would be more likely to attain it by lying quietly upstairs than by being continually moved from place to place; that is what I was going to say."
"I am sorry you think me such an Orson as to rush up and downstairs with such tremendous violence as to run the risk of dislocating her limbs."
Miss Blessington turns away pettishly.
"I wonder the girl likes to give you the trouble of perpetually carrying her about the house."
"She is well aware that trouble is a pleasure."
"Fully half her day is spent on the staircase and in the passages in your arms."
"What a horribly immoral picture – vice stalking rampant through the Felton corridors in the shape of me carrying a poor lame child that cannot carry herself!"
"It may be a pleasure to you," says Constance, harking back to her former speech, "but it can hardly be so to her – to be haled about like a bale of goods by a total stranger like yourself. If you were her brother, I grant you, it would be different."
"If I were her brother it would be different," assents Gerard, blandly.
The sentence is Miss Blessington's own, and yet, by fresh accentuation, it is made exactly to contradict itself.
"You mean it good-naturedly, I don't doubt, but I am not at all sure that it is not mistaken kindness."
"That what is not mistaken kindness?"
"You are very dull of comprehension this morning, St. John."
"I always am at these untimely hours; it requires the flame of evening to light up the torch of my intellect. Be lenient to my infirmities, and explain; I am all attention."
"My meaning is sufficiently clear, I should imagine," she retorts, with lady-like, gentle exasperation. "If you had left the girl in her original obscurity, it would have been all very well; but to be taken up and dropped again – "
"Like a hot chesnut!"
"Pshaw! to be taken up and dropped again is hardly pleasant."
"Hardly."
"And when you drop her – "
"Literally or metaphorically? – on the stone floor, or out of the light of my favour?"
"When you drop her" (disdaining to notice the interruption) —
"Well, what then?" he says, laying down the paper, and turning his face, kindled by a certain honest self-contempt, towards her – "To be dropped by me! what a prodigious calamity! Hitherto, Conny, your sex has made, with regard to me, more use of the active than the passive voice of the verb to drop."
"Nonsense!" she says, scornfully; "that is the pride that apes humility. Of course, so much notice as you lavish on her is likely to turn the head of a girl who has hitherto probably received no attentions more flattering than those of some Welsh grazier; and when you drop her – "
"When I drop her," he repeats, impatiently, tired of the subject, and of the repetition of the phrase – "she will be no worse off than she was before that misfortune happened to her."
So Esther lies all day long in lazy contentment upon the sofa, looking out at the garden, and at the fountain where four bronze dolphins spout continual showers of spray in the autumn sunlight; dips into Owen Meredith's last poems; peeps between the crisp uncut leaves of new magazine or novel; and looks forward towards the ante-dinner hour, when St. John will come in from the day's amusement or occupation, and passive content will be exchanged for active enjoyment.
Esther has, as you know, made but light of her accident in her letters to her lover; fearing lest, in his eager anxiety on her account, he might get into the train, and give her the unexpected pleasure of seeing him arrive at Felton – seeing him arrive in his threadbare shooting jacket, through whose sleeves he always appears to have thrust his long arms too far, and his patched, creaking, Naullan boots. Imagine St. John introduced to those boots! A cold shiver runs down her spine at the bare idea. St. John is no dandy, it is true, but coats from Poole's are as much a matter of course to him as a knife and fork to eat his dinner with, or a bed to lie upon.
On the afternoon of the day on which the above-reported short dialogue took place, St. John and his father, converging from different points of the compass to one centre, enter almost at the same moment the library. Two canary-coloured Colossi have just deposited tea on a small table. St. John has neither neckerchief nor collar; his brown throat is bared in a négligé as becoming to most men as the à quatre épingles exactitude of their park get-up is unbecoming.
A man in the loose carelessness of his every-day country clothes is a man: in the prim tightness of his Pall Mall toilette he is a little, stiff, jointless figure out of Noah's ark.
"Slops again!" says Paterfamilias, very gruffly. "I never come into this room at any hour of the day or night without finding you women drinking tea! Why on earth, if you are thirsty, cannot you drink beer or water, instead of ruining your insides with all that wash?"
At this courteous speech a silence falls on the company. Sir Thomas mostly brings silence with him; he is half-conscious that at his entry voices are choked and laughter quenched, and it serves to exasperate him the more.
"You sit with your knees into the fire in air-tight rooms all day long," pursues he, in his loud, hectoring voice, "and destroy your digestions with gallons of hot tea, and then you are surprised at having tallow in your cheeks, instead of lilies and roses, as your grandmothers had!"
"Perhaps," says St. John, drily, "the ladies deny the justice of your conclusions; Sir Thomas; perhaps they do not own the soft impeachment of tallowy cheeks which you so gallantly ascribe to them."
As he speaks, his eyes involuntarily rest on the clear, rose brilliance of the young stranger's happy, beautiful child-face.
"I don't mind being called 'tallow face,'" says Esther, with a low laugh – "Juliet was; her father said to her, 'Out, you baggage! you tallow face!'"
"He must have been an ancestor of Sir Thomas's in direct male line, must not he?" says the young man, gaily stooping over her and whispering.
Seeing them so familiarly and joyously whisper together, Constance looks up with an air of astonished displeasure, which Gerard perceiving, instantly turns towards her.
"What are you making, Conny?"
"Braces."
"For me, no doubt? With your usual thoughtfulness, you recollected that my birthday falls next week, and you were preparing a little surprise for me. Well, never mind; though I have made the discovery rather prematurely, I'll be as much surprised as ever when the day of presentation arrives."
"They are not for you, St. John; they are for the bazaar."
"The bazaar!" he repeats, a little testily. "For the last month all your thoughts have tended bazaarwards; you neither eat, nor sleep, nor speak, nor hear, nor smell, without some reference to the bazaar."
"Bazaar! Humbug!" growls Sir Thomas, rising and walking towards the door. "A parcel of idle women getting together to sell trash and make asses of themselves!"
Then he goes out, and bangs the door.
"I would not for worlds have given him the satisfaction of agreeing with him while he was in the room," says St. John, insensibly speaking in a louder key now that the autocrat before whom all voices sink has removed himself; "but, for once in my life, I must confess to coinciding in opinion with aged P.: to be pestered with unfeminine, unladylike importunity to buy things that one would far rather be without – to be lavishly generous, and get no credit for it – to be swindled without any hope of legal redress; this is the essence of a charitable bazaar!"
"Dear me!" says Esther, with a crestfallen sigh. "And I had been looking forward to it so much!"
He sits down on a low chair beside her sofa. "Looking forward to a bazaar!" he echoes, with a half-incredulous smile. "My dear Miss Craven, what a revelation as to your past history that one sentence is! Why, I should as soon think of looking forward to a visit to the dentist, or to my mother's funeral!"
"No one expects to enjoy it; it is a necessary evil," says Miss Blessington, with resignation.
"Like dancing with married men, or going to church?"
"Conny! Conny!" shouts Sir Thomas from somewhere in the unseen distance.
Conny rises, though reluctantly, and leaves the other two tête-à-tête.
"Miss Blessington is going to have a stall," says Esther, presently, for the sake of saying something, catching a little nervously at the first remark that occurred to her.
"Yes."
"And I am to help her."
"Yes."
"But I will promise not to pester you with unfeminine, unladylike importunity to buy my wares."
"I am sorry to hear it."
"Miss Blessington has two friends coming to stay with her for it."
"Yes."
"Are you glad or sorry?"
"Glad is a weak word to express my feelings; I am in ecstasies!"
"They are beautiful, I suppose – refined, witty, as I always picture the women of your world?" she says, a little enviously.
"On the contrary, it would be impossible to find two more faded, negative specimens of Belgravian womanhood: they have not a single angle in either of their characters."
"Do you think that a recommendation?"
"I did not say so."
"But you implied it, by expressing such exaggerated joy at their coming."
"So I did – so I do: and if they were to rise in number from two to fifty, like Falstaff's highwaymen, I should express greater joy still."
"And why?" raising herself from her cushions to get a straighter, truer look into his bright, grave eyes.
"Because," he says, lowering his voice a little, and leaning closelier over her, "the larger the party the better chance there is of undisturbed tête-à-têtes between congenial spirits. Do you see?"
And Esther does see, and thinking on Robert Brandon, is uneasily joyful.
Ere the arrival of the looked-for bazaar, Miss Craven's cure is complete. On the day preceding the one appointed for that philanthropic festivity, she has been walking in the late evening about the moon-coloured garden, free from any remaining lameness, leaning on St. John's arm. She does not need the slight stay, but it pleases him to give and her to receive it. It does not please Miss Blessington, however, watching them from an upper chamber – watching Esther dabble her small hands in the opal water in the great bronze water-lily leaf that makes the basin of the fountain – watching St. John, rapt and absorbed in her pretty foolish chatter. And yet their talk, if she could but hear it, holds nothing obnoxiously fond or flirtatious; it might be proclaimed by the bellman in the streets.
"How nice it is to be no longer a devil upon two sticks!" the young girl is saying, joyfully; and the man makes answer, "You will be up to another gallop across the park to-morrow?"