She made a great effort. 'Not that, Louis. Do not ask any more; it is better not; you have done as your father wished--now let us be as we were before.'

'My father will be very much disappointed,' said Louis, with chagrin.

'I will take care of your father,' said Mrs. Ponsonby, and as Mary took the moment for escaping, she proceeded to say some affectionate words of her own tender feeling towards Louis; to which he only replied by saying, sadly, and with some mortification, 'Never mind; I know it is quite right. I am not worthy of her.'

'That is not the point; but I do not think you understand your own feelings, or how far you were actuated by the wish to gratify your father.'

'I a.s.sure you,' cried Louis, 'you do not guess how I look up to Mary; her unfailing kindness, her entering into all my nonsense--her firm, sound judgment, that would keep me right--and all she did for me when I was laid up. Oh! why cannot you believe how dear she is to me?'

'_How dear_ is just what I do believe; but still this is not enough.'

'Just what Aunt Kitty says,' said Louis, perplexed, yet amused at his own perplexity.

'You will know better by-and-by,' she answered, smiling: 'in the meantime, believe that you are our very dear cousin, as ever.' And she shook hands with him, detecting in his answering smile a little relief, although a great deal of disappointment.

Mary had taken refuge in her room, where a great shower of tears would have their course, though she scolded herself all the time. 'Have done!

have done! It is best as it is. He does not really wish it, and I could not leave mamma. We will never think of it again, and we will be as happy as we were before.'

Her mother, meanwhile, was waiting below-stairs, thinking that she should spare Louis something, by taking the initiative in speaking to his father; and she was sorry to see the alacrity with which the Earl came up to her, with a congratulatory 'Well, Mary!' She could hardly make him comprehend the real state of the case; and then his resignation was far more trying than that of the party chiefly concerned. Her praise of Fitzjocelyn had little power to comfort. 'I see how it is,' he said, calmly: 'do not try to explain it away; I acquiesce--I have no doubt you acted wisely for your daughter.'

'Nothing would have delighted me more, if he were but a few years older.'

'You need not tell me the poor boy's failings,' said his father, sadly.

'It is on account of no failing; but would it not be a great mistake to risk their happiness to fulfil our own scheme?'

'I hoped to secure their happiness.'

'Ay, but is there not something too capricious to find happiness without its own free will and choice? Did you never hear of the heart?'

'Oh! if she be attached elsewhere'--and he seemed so much relieved, that Mrs. Ponsonby was sorry to be obliged to contradict him in haste, and explain that she did not believe Fitzjocelyn's heart to be yet developed; whereupon he was again greatly vexed. 'So he has offered himself without attachment. I beg your pardon, Mary; I am sorry your daughter should have been so treated.'

'Do not misunderstand me. He is strangely youthful and simple, bent on pleasing you, and fancying his warm, brotherly feeling to be what you desire.'

'It would be the safest foundation.'

'Yes, if he were ten years older, and had seen the world; but in these things he is like a child, and it would be dangerous to influence him.

Do not take it to heart; you ought to be contented, for I saw nothing so plainly as that he loves n.o.body half so well as you. Only be patient with him.'

'You are the same Mary as ever,' he said, softened; and she left him, hoping that she had secured a favourable audience for his son, who soon appeared at the window, somewhat like a culprit.

'I could not help it!' he said.

'No; but you may set a n.o.ble aim before you--you may render yourself worthy of her esteem and confidence, and in so doing you will fulfil my fondest hopes.'

'I asked her to try me, but they would make no conditions. I am sorry this could not be, since you wished it.'

'If you are not sorry on your own account, there are no regrets to be wasted on mine.'

'Candidly, father,' said Louis, 'much as I like her, I cannot be sorry to keep my youth and liberty a little longer.'

'Then you should never have entered on the subject at all,' said Lord Ormersfield, beginning to write a letter; and poor Louis, in his praiseworthy effort not to be reserved with him, found he had been confessing that he had not only been again making a fool of himself, but, what was less frequent and less pardonable, of his father likewise. He limped out at the window, and was presently found by his great-aunt, reading what he called a raving novel, to see how he ought to have done it. She shook her head at him, and told him that he was not even decently concerned.

'Indeed I am,' he replied. 'I wished my father to have had some peace of mind about me, and it does not flatter one's vanity.'

Dear, soft-hearted Aunt Kitty, with all her stores of comfort ready prepared, and unable to forgive, or even credit, the rejection of her Louis, without a prior attachment, gave a hint that this might be his consolation. He caught eagerly at the idea. 'I had never once thought of that! It can't be any Spaniard out in Peru--she has too much sense.

What are you looking so funny about? What! is it nearer home? That's it, then! Famous! It would be a capital arrangement, if that terrible old father is conformable. What an escape I have had of him! I am sure it is a most natural and proper preference--'

'Stop! stop, Louis, you are going too fast. I know nothing. Don't say a word to Jem, on any account: indeed, you must not. It is all going on very well now; but the least notion that he was observed, or that it was his Uncle Oliver's particular wish, and there would be an end of it.'

She was just wise enough to keep back the wishes of the other vizier, but she had said enough to set Louis quite at his ease, and put him in the highest spirits. He seemed to have taken out a new lease of boyishness, and, though constrained before Mary, laughed, talked, and played pranks, so as unconsciously to fret his father exceedingly.

Clara's alert wits perceived that so many private interviews had some signification; and Mrs. Frost found her talking it over with her brother, and conjecturing so much, that granny thought it best to supply the key, thinking, perhaps, that a little jealousy would do Jem no harm. But the effect on him was to produce a fit of hearty laughter, as he remembered poor Lord Ormersfield's unaccountable urbanity and suppressed exultation in the morning's ride. 'I honour the Ponsonbys,' he said, 'for not choosing to second his lordship's endeavours to tyrannize over that poor fellow, body and soul. Poor Louis! he is fabulously dutiful.'

But Clara, recovering from her first stupor of wonder, began scolding him for presuming to laugh at anything so cruel to Louis. It was not the part of a friend! And with tears of indignation and sympathy starting from her eyes, she was pathetically certain that, though granny and Jem were so unfeeling as to laugh, his high spirits were only a.s.sumed to hide his suffering. 'Poor Louis! what had he not said to her about Mary last night! Now she knew what he meant! And as to Mary, she was glad she had never liked her, she had no patience with her: of course, she was far too prosy and stupid to care for anything like Louis, it was a great escape for him. It would serve her right to marry a horrid little crooked clerk in her father's office; and poor dear, dear Louis must get over it, and have the most beautiful wife in the world. Don't you remember, Jem, the lady with the splendid dark eyes on the platform at Euston Square, when you so nearly made us miss the train, with the brow that you said--'

'Hush, Clara, don't talk nonsense.'

CHAPTER XII.

CHILDE ROLAND.

A house there is, and that's enough, From whence one fatal morning issues A brace of warriors, not in buff, But rustling in their silks and tissues.

The heroines undertook the task; Thro' lanes unknown, o'er stiles they ventured,-- Rapped at the door, nor stayed to ask, But bounce into the parlour entered.

Gray's Long Story.

'No carmine? Nor scarlet lake in powder?'

'Could procure some, my Lord.'

'Thank you, the actinia would not live. I must take what I can find. A lump of gamboge--'

'If you stay much longer, he will not retain his senses,' muttered James Frost, who was leaning backwards against the counter, where the bewildered bookseller of the little coast-town of Bickleypool was bustling, in the vain endeavour to understand and fulfil the demands of that perplexing customer, Lord Fitzjocelyn.

'Some drawing-paper. This is hardly absorbent enough. If you have any block sketch-books?--'

'Could procure some, my Lord.'

James looked at his watch, while the man dived into his innermost recesses. 'The tide!' he said.

'Never mind, we shall only stick in the mud.'

'How could you expect to find anything here? A half-crown paint-box is their wildest dream.'