‘My chocolate is sent up, exquisitely concocted, in plate of the purest quality—lovely little silver cups! I have already quite set the fashion for the ladies to have chocolate in bed. The men, I hear, complain that there is no lady at the breakfast-table. They have Miss Carrington to superintend. I read, in the subdued satisfaction of her eyes (completely without colour), how much she thanks me and the institution of chocolate in bed. Poor Miss Carrington is no match for her opportunities. One may give them to her without dread.
‘It is ten on the Sabbath morn. The sweet churchbells are ringing. It seems like a dream. There is nothing but the religion attaches me to England; but that—is not that everything? How I used to sigh on Sundays to hear them in Portugal!
‘I have an idea of instituting toilette-receptions. They will not please Miss Carrington so well.
‘Now to the peaceful village church, and divine worship. Adieu, my dear. I kiss my fingers to Silva. Make no effort to amuse him. He is always occupied. Bread!—he asks no more. Adieu! Carry will be invited with your little man.... You unhappily unable.... She, the sister I pine to see, to show her worthy of my praises. Expectation and excitement! Adieu!’
Filled with pleasing emotions at the thought of the service in the quiet village church, and worshipping in the principal pew, under the blazonry of the Jocelyn arms, the Countess sealed her letter and addressed it, and then examined the name of Cogglesby; which plebeian name, it struck her, would not sound well to the menials of Beckley Court. While she was deliberating what to do to conceal it, she heard, through her open window, the voices of some young men laughing. She beheld her brother pass these young men, and bow to them. She beheld them stare at him without at all returning his salute, and then one of them—the same who had filled her ears with venom at Fallow field—turned to the others and laughed outrageously, crying—
‘By Jove! this comes it strong. Fancy the snipocracy here—eh?’
What the others said the Countess did not wait to hear. She put on her bonnet hastily, tried the effect of a peculiar smile in the mirror, and lightly ran down-stairs.
CHAPTER XV. A CAPTURE
The three youths were standing in the portico when the Countess appeared among them. She singled out him who was specially obnoxious to her, and sweetly inquired the direction to the village post. With the renowned gallantry of his nation, he offered to accompany her, but presently, with a different exhibition of the same, proposed that they should spare themselves the trouble by dropping the letter she held prominently, in the bag.
‘Thanks,’ murmured the Countess, ‘I will go.’ Upon which his eager air subsided, and he fell into an awkward silent march at her side, looking so like the victim he was to be, that the Countess could have emulated his power of laughter.
‘And you are Mr. Harry Jocelyn, the very famous cricketer?’
He answered, glancing back at his friends, that he was, but did not know about the ‘famous.’
‘Oh! but I saw you—I saw you hit the ball most beautifully, and dearly wished my brother had an equal ability. Brought up in the Court of Portugal, he is barely English. There they have no manly sports. You saw him pass you?’
‘Him! Who?’ asked Harry.
‘My brother, on the lawn, this moment. Your sweet sister’s friend. Your uncle Melville’s secretary.’
‘What’s his name?’ said Harry, in blunt perplexity.
The Countess repeated his name, which in her pronunciation was ‘Hawington,’ adding, ‘That was my brother. I am his sister. Have you heard of the Countess de Saldar?’
‘Countess!’ muttered Harry. ‘Dash it! here’s a mistake.’
She continued, with elegant fan-like motion of her gloved fingers: ‘They say there is a likeness between us. The dear Queen of Portugal often remarked it, and in her it was a compliment to me, for she thought my brother a model! You I should have known from your extreme resemblance to your lovely young sister.’
Coarse food, but then Harry was a youthful Englishman; and the Countess dieted the vanity according to the nationality. With good wine to wash it down, one can swallow anything. The Countess lent him her eyes for that purpose; eyes that had a liquid glow under the dove—like drooping lids. It was a principle of hers, pampering our poor sex with swinish solids or the lightest ambrosia, never to let the accompanying cordial be other than of the finest quality. She knew that clowns, even more than aristocrats, are flattered by the inebriation of delicate celestial liquors.
‘Now,’ she said, after Harry had gulped as much of the dose as she chose to administer direct from the founts, ‘you must accord me the favour to tell me all about yourself, for I have heard much of you, Mr. Harry Jocelyn, and you have excited my woman’s interest. Of me you know nothing.’
‘Haven’t I?’ cried Harry, speaking to the pitch of his new warmth. ‘My uncle Melville goes on about you tremendously—makes his wife as jealous as fire. How could I tell that was your brother?’
‘Your uncle has deigned to allude to me?’ said the Countess, meditatively. ‘But not of him—of you, Mr. Harry! What does he say?’
‘Says you’re so clever you ought to be a man.’
‘Ah! generous!’ exclaimed the Countess. ‘The idea, I think, is novel to him. Is it not?’
‘Well, I believe, from what I hear, he didn’t back you for much over in Lisbon,’ said veracious Harry.
‘I fear he is deceived in me now. I fear I am but a woman—I am not to be “backed.” But you are not talking of yourself.’
‘Oh! never mind me,’ was Harry’s modest answer.
‘But I do. Try to imagine me as clever as a man, and talk to me of your doings. Indeed I will endeavour to comprehend you.’
Thus humble, the Countess bade him give her his arm. He stuck it out with abrupt eagerness.
‘Not against my cheek.’ She laughed forgivingly. ‘And you need not start back half-a-mile,’ she pursued with plain humour: ‘and please do not look irresolute and awkward—It is not necessary,’ she added. ‘There!’; and she settled her fingers on him, ‘I am glad I can find one or two things to instruct you in. Begin. You are a great cricketer. What else?’
Ay! what else? Harry might well say he had no wish to talk of himself. He did not know even how to give his arm to a lady! The first flattery and the subsequent chiding clashed in his elated soul, and caused him to deem himself one of the blest suddenly overhauled by an inspecting angel and found wanting: or, in his own more accurate style of reflection, ‘What a rattling fine woman this is, and what a deuce of a fool she must think me!’
The Countess leaned on his arm with dainty languor.
‘You walk well,’ she said.
Harry’s backbone straightened immediately.
‘No, no; I do not want you to be a drill-sergeant. Can you not be told you are perfect without seeking to improve, vain boy? You can cricket, and you can walk, and will very soon learn how to give your arm to a lady. I have hopes of you. Of your friends, from whom I have ruthlessly dragged you, I have not much. Am I personally offensive to them, Mr. Harry? I saw them let my brother pass without returning his bow, and they in no way acknowledged my presence as I passed. Are they gentlemen?’
‘Yes,’ said Harry, stupefied by the question. ‘One ‘s Ferdinand Laxley, Lord Laxley’s son, heir to the title; the other’s William Harvey, son of the Chief Justice—both friends of mine.’
‘But not of your manners,’ interposed the Countess. ‘I have not so much compunction as I ought to have in divorcing you from your associates for a few minutes. I think I shall make a scholar of you in one or two essentials. You do want polish. Have I not a right to take you in hand? I have defended you already.’
‘Me?’ cried Harry.
‘None other than Mr. Harry Jocelyn. Will he vouchsafe to me his pardon? It has been whispered in my ears that his ambition is to be the Don Juan of a country district, and I have said for him, that however grovelling his undirected tastes, he is too truly noble to plume himself upon the reputation they have procured him. Why did I defend you? Women, you know, do not shrink from Don Juans—even provincial Don Juans—as they should, perhaps, for their own sakes! You are all of you dangerous, if a woman is not strictly on her guard. But you will respect your champion, will you not?’
Harry was about to reply with wonderful briskness. He stopped, and murmured boorishly that he was sure he was very much obliged.
Command of countenance the Countess possessed in common with her sex. Those faces on which we make them depend entirely, women can entirely control. Keenly sensible to humour as the Countess was, her face sidled up to his immovably sweet. Harry looked, and looked away, and looked again. The poor fellow was so profoundly aware of his foolishness that he even doubted whether he was admired.
The Countess trifled with his English nature; quietly watched him bob between tugging humility and airy conceit, and went on:
‘Yes! I will trust you, and that is saying very much, for what protection is a brother? I am alone here—defenceless!’
Men, of course, grow virtuously zealous in an instant on behalf of the lovely dame who tells them bewitchingly, she is alone and defenceless, with pitiful dimples round the dewy mouth that entreats their guardianship and mercy!
The provincial Don Juan found words—a sign of clearer sensations within. He said:
‘Upon my honour, I’d look after you better than fifty brothers!’
The Countess eyed him softly, and then allowed herself the luxury of a laugh.
‘No, no! it is not the sheep, it is the wolf I fear.’
And she went through a bit of the concluding portion of the drama of Little Red Riding Hood very prettily, and tickled him so that he became somewhat less afraid of her.
‘Are you truly so bad as report would have you to be, Mr. Harry?’ she asked, not at all in the voice of a censor.
‘Pray don’t think me—a—anything you wouldn’t have me,’ the youth stumbled into an apt response.
‘We shall see,’ said the Countess, and varied her admiration for the noble creature beside her with gentle ejaculations on the beauty of the deer that ranged the park of Beckley Court, the grand old oaks and beeches, the clumps of flowering laurel, and the rich air swarming Summer.
She swept out her arm. ‘And this most magnificent estate will be yours? How happy will she be who is led hither to reside by you, Mr. Harry!’
‘Mine? No; there’s the bother,’ he answered, with unfeigned chagrin. ‘Beckley isn’t Elburne property, you know. It belongs to old Mrs. Bonner, Rose’s grandmama.’
‘Oh!’ interjected the Countess, indifferently.
‘I shall never get it—no chance,’ Harry pursued. ‘Lost my luck with the old lady long ago.’ He waxed excited on a subject that drew him from his shamefacedness. ‘It goes to Juley Bonner, or to Rosey; it’s a toss-up which. If I’d stuck up to Juley, I might have had a pretty fair chance. They wanted me to, that’s why I scout the premises. But fancy Juley Bonner!’
‘You couldn’t, upon your honour!’ rhymed the Countess. (And Harry let loose a delighted ‘Ha! ha!’ as at a fine stroke of wit.) ‘Are we enamoured of a beautiful maiden, Senor Harry?’
‘Not a bit,’ he assured her eagerly. ‘I don’t know any girl. I don’t care for ‘em. I don’t, really.’
The Countess impressively declared to him that he must be guided by her; and that she might the better act his monitress, she desired to hear the pedigree of the estate, and the exact relations in which it at present stood toward the Elburne family.
Glad of any theme he could speak on, Harry informed her that Beckley Court was bought by his grandfather Bonner from the proceeds of a successful oil speculation.
‘So we ain’t much on that side,’ he said.
‘Oil!’ was the Countess’s weary exclamation. ‘I imagined Beckley Court to be your ancestral mansion. Oil!’
Harry deprecatingly remarked that oil was money.
‘Yes,’ she replied; ‘but you are not one to mix oil with your Elburne blood. Let me see—oil! That, I conceive, is grocery. So, you are grocers on one side!’
‘Oh, come! hang it!’ cried Harry, turning red.
‘Am I leaning on the grocer’s side, or on the lord’s?’
Harry felt dreadfully taken down. ‘One ranks with one’s father,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ observed the Countess; ‘but you should ever be careful not to expose the grocer. When I beheld my brother bow to you, and that your only return was to stare at him in that singular way, I was not aware of this, and could not account for it.’
I declare I’m very sorry,’ said Harry, with a nettled air. ‘Do just let me tell you how it happened. We were at an inn, where there was an odd old fellow gave a supper; and there was your brother, and another fellow—as thorough an upstart as I ever met, and infernally impudent. He got drinking, and wanted to fight us. Now I see it! Your brother, to save his friend’s bones, said he was a tailor! Of course no gentleman could fight a tailor; and it blew over with my saying we’d order our clothes of him.’
‘Said he was a—!’ exclaimed the Countess, gazing blankly.
‘I don’t wonder at your feeling annoyed,’ returned Harry. ‘I saw him with Rosey next day, and began to smell a rat then, but Laxley won’t give up the tailor. He’s as proud as Lucifer. He wanted to order a suit of your brother to-day; but I said—not while he’s in the house, however he came here.’
The Countess had partially recovered. They were now in the village street, and Harry pointed out the post-office.
‘Your divination with regard to my brother’s most eccentric behaviour was doubtless correct,’ she said. ‘He wished to succour his wretched companion. Anywhere—it matters not to him what!—he allies himself with miserable mortals. He is the modern Samaritan. You should thank him for saving you an encounter with some low creature.’
Swaying the letter to and fro, she pursued archly: ‘I can read your thoughts. You are dying to know to whom this dear letter is addressed!’
Instantly Harry, whose eyes had previously been quite empty of expression, glanced at the letter wistfully.
Shall I tell you?’
‘Yes, do.’
‘It’s to somebody I love.’
‘Are you in love then?’ was his disconcerted rejoinder.
‘Am I not married?’
‘Yes; but every woman that’s married isn’t in love with her husband, you know.’
‘Oh! Don Juan of the provinces!’ she cried, holding the seal of the letter before him in playful reproof. ‘Fie!’
‘Come! who is it?’ Harry burst out.
‘I am not, surely, obliged to confess my correspondence to you? Remember!’ she laughed lightly. ‘He already assumes the airs of a lord and master! You are rapid, Mr. Harry.’
‘Won’t you really tell me?’ he pleaded.
She put a corner of the letter in the box. ‘Must I?’
All was done with the archest elegance: the bewildering condescension of a Goddess to a boor.
‘I don’t say you must, you know: but I should like to see it,’ returned Harry.
‘There!’ She showed him a glimpse of ‘Mrs.,’ cleverly concealing plebeian ‘Cogglesby,’ and the letter slid into darkness. ‘Are you satisfied?’
‘Yes,’ said Harry, wondering why he felt a relief at the sight of ‘Mrs.’ written on a letter by a lady he had only known half an hour.
‘And now,’ said she, ‘I shall demand a boon of you, Mr. Harry. Will it be accorded?’
She was hurriedly told that she might count upon him for whatever she chose to ask; and after much trifling and many exaggerations of the boon in question, he heard that she had selected him as her cavalier for the day, and that he was to consent to accompany her to the village church.
‘Is it so great a request, the desire that you should sit beside a solitary lady for so short a space?’ she asked, noting his rueful visage.
Harry assured her he would be very happy, but hinted at the bother of having to sit and listen to that fool of a Parsley: again assuring her, and with real earnestness, which the lady now affected to doubt, that he would be extremely happy.
‘You know, I haven’t been there for ages,’ he explained.
‘I hear it!’ she sighed, aware of the credit his escort would bring her in Beckley, and especially with Harry’s grandmama Bonner.
They went together to the village church. The Countess took care to be late, so that all eyes beheld her stately march up the aisle, with her captive beside her.
Nor was her captive less happy than he professed he would be. Charming comic side-play, at the expense of Mr. Parsley, she mingled with exceeding devoutness, and a serious attention to Mr. Parsley’s discourse. In her heart this lady really thought her confessed daily sins forgiven her by the recovery of the lost sheep to Mr. Parsley’s fold. The results of this small passage of arms were, that Evan’s disclosure at Fallow field was annulled in the mind of Harry Jocelyn, and the latter gentleman became the happy slave of the Countess de Saldar.
CHAPTER XVI. LEADS TO A SMALL SKIRMISH BETWEEN ROSE AND EVAN
Lady Jocelyn belonged properly to that order which the Sultans and the Roxalanas of earth combine to exclude from their little games, under the designation of blues, or strong-minded women: a kind, if genuine, the least dangerous and staunchest of the sex, as poor fellows learn when the flippant and the frail fair have made mummies of them. She had the frankness of her daughter, the same direct eyes and firm step: a face without shadows, though no longer bright with youth. It may be charged to her as one of the errors of her strong mind, that she believed friendship practicable between men and women, young or old. She knew the world pretty well, and was not amazed by extraordinary accidents; but as she herself continued to be an example of her faith: we must presume it natural that her delusion should cling to her. She welcomed Evan as her daughter’s friend, walked half-way across the room to meet him on his introduction to her, and with the simple words, ‘I have heard of you,’ let him see that he stood upon his merits in her house. The young man’s spirit caught something of hers even in their first interview, and at once mounted to that level. Unconsciously he felt that she took, and would take him, for what he was, and he rose to his worth in the society she presided over. A youth like Evan could not perceive, that in loving this lady’s daughter, and accepting the place she offered him, he was guilty of a breach of confidence; or reflect, that her entire absence of suspicion imposed upon him a corresponding honesty toward her. He fell into a blindness. Without dreaming for a moment that she designed to encourage his passion for Rose, he yet beheld himself in the light she had cast on him; and, received as her daughter’s friend, it seemed to him not so utterly monstrous that he might be her daughter’s lover. A haughty, a grand, or a too familiar manner, would have kept his eyes clearer on his true condition. Lady Jocelyn spoke to his secret nature, and eclipsed in his mind the outward aspects with which it was warring. To her he was a gallant young man, a fit companion for Rose, and when she and Sir Franks said, and showed him, that they were glad to know him, his heart swam in a flood of happiness they little suspected.
This was another of the many forms of intoxication to which circumstances subjected the poor lover. In Fallow field, among impertinent young men, Evan’s pride proclaimed him a tailor. At Beckley Court, acted on by one genuine soul, he forgot it, and felt elate in his manhood. The shades of Tailordom dispersed like fog before the full South-west breeze. When I say he forgot it, the fact was present enough to him, but it became an outward fact: he had ceased to feel it within him. It was not a portion of his being, hard as Mrs. Mel had struck to fix it. Consequently, though he was in a far worse plight than when he parted with Rose on board the Jocasta, he felt much less of an impostor now. This may have been partly because he had endured his struggle with the Demogorgon the Countess painted to him in such frightful colours, and found him human after all; but it was mainly owing to the hearty welcome Lady Jocelyn had extended to him as the friend of Rose.
Loving Rose, he nevertheless allowed his love no tender liberties. The eyes of a lover are not his own; but his hands and lips are, till such time as they are claimed. The sun must smile on us with peculiar warmth to woo us forth utterly-pluck our hearts out. Rose smiled on many. She smiled on Drummond Forth, Ferdinand Laxley, William Harvey, and her brother Harry; and she had the same eyes for all ages. Once, previous to the arrival of the latter three, there was a change in her look, or Evan fancied it. They were going to ride out together, and Evan, coming to his horse on the gravel walk, saw her talking with Drummond Forth. He mounted, awaiting her, and either from a slight twinge of jealousy, or to mark her dainty tread with her riding-habit drawn above her heels, he could not help turning his head occasionally. She listened to Drummond with attention, but presently broke from him, crying: ‘It’s an absurdity. Speak to them yourself—I shall not.’
On the ride that day, she began prattling of this and that with the careless glee that became her well, and then sank into a reverie. Between-whiles her eyes had raised tumults in Evan’s breast by dropping on him in a sort of questioning way, as if she wished him to speak, or wished to fathom something she would rather have unspoken. Ere they had finished their ride, she tossed off what burden may have been on her mind as lightly as a stray lock from her shoulders. He thought that the singular look recurred. It charmed him too much for him to speculate on it.
The Countess’s opportune ally, the gout, which had reduced the Hon. Melville Jocelyn’s right hand to a state of uselessness, served her with her brother equally: for, having volunteered his services to the invalided diplomatist, it excused his stay at Beckley Court to himself, and was a mask to his intimacy with Rose, besides earning him the thanks of the family. Harry Jocelyn, released from the wing of the Countess, came straight to him, and in a rough kind of way begged Evan to overlook his rudeness.
‘You took us all in at Fallow field, except Drummond,’ he said. ‘Drummond would have it you were joking. I see it now. And you’re a confoundedly clever fellow into the bargain, or you wouldn’t be quill-driving for Uncle Mel. Don’t be uppish about it—will you?’
‘You have nothing to fear on that point,’ said Evan. With which promise the peace was signed between them. Drummond and William Harvey were cordial, and just laughed over the incident. Laxley, however, held aloof. His retention of ideas once formed befitted his rank and station. Some trifling qualms attended Evan’s labours with the diplomatist; but these were merely occasioned by the iteration of a particular phrase. Mr. Goren, an enthusiastic tailor, had now and then thrown out to Evan stirring hints of an invention he claimed: the discovery of a Balance in Breeches: apparently the philosopher’s stone of the tailor craft, a secret that should ensure harmony of outline to the person and an indubitable accommodation to the most difficult legs.
Since Adam’s expulsion, it seemed, the tailors of this wilderness had been in search of it. But like the doctors of this wilderness, their science knew no specific: like the Babylonian workmen smitten with confusion of tongues, they had but one word in common, and that word was ‘cut.’ Mr. Goren contended that to cut was not the key of the science: but to find a Balance was. An artistic admirer of the frame of man, Mr. Goren was not wanting in veneration for the individual who had arisen to do it justice. He spoke of his Balance with supreme self-appreciation. Nor less so the Honourable Melville, who professed to have discovered the Balance of Power, at home and abroad. It was a capital Balance, but inferior to Mr. Goren’s. The latter gentleman guaranteed a Balance with motion: whereas one step not only upset the Honourable Melville’s, but shattered the limbs of Europe. Let us admit, that it is easier to fit a man’s legs than to compress expansive empires.
Evan enjoyed the doctoring of kingdoms quite as well as the diplomatist. It suited the latent grandeur of soul inherited by him from the great Mel. He liked to prop Austria and arrest the Czar, and keep a watchful eye on France; but the Honourable Melville’s deep-mouthed phrase conjured up to him a pair of colossal legs imperiously demanding their Balance likewise. At first the image scared him. In time he was enabled to smile it into phantom vagueness. The diplomatist diplomatically informed him, it might happen that the labours he had undertaken might be neither more nor less than education for a profession he might have to follow. Out of this, an ardent imagination, with the Countess de Saldar for an interpreter, might construe a promise of some sort. Evan soon had high hopes. What though his name blazed on a shop-front? The sun might yet illumine him to honour!
Where a young man is getting into delicate relations with a young woman, the more of his sex the better—they serve as a blind; and the Countess hailed fresh arrivals warmly. There was Sir John Loring, Dorothy’s father, who had married the eldest of the daughters of Lord Elburne. A widower, handsome, and a flirt, he capitulated to the Countess instantly, and was played off against the provincial Don Juan, who had reached that point with her when youths of his description make bashful confidences of their successes, and receive delicious chidings for their naughtiness—rebukes which give immeasurable rebounds. Then came Mr. Gordon Graine, with his daughter, Miss Jenny Graine, an early friend of Rose’s, and numerous others. For the present, Miss Isabella Current need only be chronicled among the visitors—a sprightly maid fifty years old, without a wrinkle to show for it—the Aunt Bel of fifty houses where there were young women and little boys. Aunt Bel had quick wit and capital anecdotes, and tripped them out aptly on a sparkling tongue with exquisite instinct for climax and when to strike for a laugh. No sooner had she entered the hall than she announced the proximate arrival of the Duke of Belfield at her heels, and it was known that his Grace was as sure to follow as her little dog, who was far better paid for his devotion.
The dinners at Beckley Court had hitherto been rather languid to those who were not intriguing or mixing young love with the repast. Miss Current was an admirable neutral, sent, as the Countess fervently believed, by Providence. Till now the Countess had drawn upon her own resources to amuse the company, and she had been obliged to restrain herself from doing it with that unctuous feeling for rank which warmed her Portuguese sketches in low society and among her sisters. She retired before Miss Current and formed audience, glad of a relief to her inventive labour. While Miss Current and her ephemerals lightly skimmed the surface of human life, the Countess worked in the depths. Vanities, passions, prejudices beneath the surface, gave her full employment. How naturally poor Juliana Bonner was moved to mistake Evan’s compassion for a stronger sentiment! The Countess eagerly assisted Providence to shuffle the company into their proper places. Harry Jocelyn was moodily happy, but good; greatly improved in the eyes of his grandmama Bonner, who attributed the change to the Countess, and partly forgave her the sinful consent to the conditions of her love-match with the foreign Count, which his penitent wife had privately confessed to that strict Churchwoman.
‘Thank Heaven that you have no children,’ Mrs. Bonner had said; and the Countess humbly replied:
‘It is indeed my remorseful consolation!’
‘Who knows that it is not your punishment?’ added Mrs. Bonner; the Countess weeping.
She went and attended morning prayers in Mrs. Bonner’s apartments, alone with the old lady. ‘To make up for lost time in Catholic Portugal!’ she explained it to the household.
On the morning after Miss Current had come to shape the party, most of the inmates of Beckley Court being at breakfast, Rose gave a lead to the conversation.
‘Aunt Bel! I want to ask you something. We’ve been making bets about you. Now, answer honestly, we’re all friends. Why did you refuse all your offers?’
‘Quite simple, child,’ replied the unabashed ex-beauty.
‘A matter of taste. I liked twenty shillings better than a sovereign.’
Rose looked puzzled, but the men laughed, and Rose exclaimed:
‘Now I see! How stupid I am! You mean, you may have friends when you are not married. Well, I think that’s the wisest, after all. You don’t lose them, do you? Pray, Mr. Evan, are you thinking Aunt Bel might still alter her mind for somebody, if she knew his value?’
‘I was presuming to hope there might be a place vacant among the twenty,’ said Evan, slightly bowing to both. ‘Am I pardoned?’
‘I like you!’ returned Aunt Bel, nodding at him. ‘Where do you come from? A young man who’ll let himself go for small coin’s a jewel worth knowing.’
‘Where do I come from?’ drawled Laxley, who had been tapping an egg with a dreary expression.
‘Aunt Bel spoke to Mr. Harrington,’ said Rose, pettishly.
‘Asked him where he came from,’ Laxley continued his drawl. ‘He didn’t answer, so I thought it polite for another of the twenty to strike in.’
‘I must thank you expressly,’ said Evan, and achieved a cordial bow.
Rose gave Evan one of her bright looks, and then called the attention of Ferdinand Laxley to the fact that he had lost a particular bet made among them.
‘What bet?’ asked Laxley. ‘About the profession?’
A stream of colour shot over Rose’s face. Her eyes flew nervously from Laxley to Evan, and then to Drummond. Laxley appeared pleased as a man who has made a witty sally: Evan was outwardly calm, while Drummond replied to the mute appeal of Rose, by saying:
‘Yes; we’ve all lost. But who could hit it? The lady admits no sovereign in our sex.’
‘So you’ve been betting about me?’ said Aunt Bel. ‘I ‘ll settle the dispute. Let him who guessed “Latin” pocket the stakes, and, if I guess him, let him hand them over to me.’