"O, Clarissa, do pray be candid. You _must_ understand what I mean. That wretched man has been making love to you?"

"You ought not to ask me such a question, Lady Laura," answered Clarissa, sorely perplexed by this straight attack.

"You must know that I should respect Lady Geraldine's position--that I should be incapable of forgetting her claims upon Mr. Fairfax. Whatever he may have said to me has been, the merest folly. He knows that I consider it in that light, and I have refused ever to see him again if I can possibly help it."

"That's right, dear!" cried Lady Laura, with a pleased look. "I knew that you would come out of the business well, in spite of everything. Of course you can care nothing for this foolish fellow; but I know Geraldine's sensitive nature so well, and that if she had the faintest suspicion of George's conduct, the whole thing would be off for ever--an attachment of many years' standing, think of that, Clary! Now I want you to promise me that, come what may, you will give Mr. Fairfax no encouragement. Without encouragement this foolish fancy will die out very quickly. Of course, if it were possible you could care for him, I would not come here to ask you such a thing as this. You would have a right to consider your own happiness before my sister's. But as that is out of the question, and the man is almost a stranger to you----"

"Out of the question--almost a stranger." Clarissa remembered that night in the railway carriage, and it seemed to her as if she and George Fairfax had never been strangers.

"It is so easy for you to give me this promise. Tell me now, Clary dear, that you will not have anything to say to him, if he should contrive to see you again."

"I will not, Lady Laura."

"Is that a promise, now, Clarissa?"

"A most sacred promise."

Lady Armstrong kissed her young friend in ratification of the compact.

"You are a dear generous-minded girl," she said, "and I feel as if I had saved my sister's happiness by this bold course. And now tell me what you have been doing since you left us. Have you seen anything more of the Grangers?"

Questioned thus, Clarissa was fain to give her friend some slight account of her day at Arden.

"It must have affected you very much to see the old place. Ah, Clary, it is you who ought to be mistress there, instead of Miss Granger!"

Clarissa blushed, remembering that awkward avowal of Daniel Granger's.

"I am not fit to be mistress of such, a place," she said. "I could never manage things as Miss Granger does."

"Not in that petty way, perhaps. I should not care to see you keeping accounts and prying into grocery-lists as she does. You would govern your house on a grander scale. I should like to see you the owner of a great house."

"That is a thing you are never likely to see, Lady Laura."

"I am not so sure of that. I have an idea that there is a great fortune lying at your feet, if you would only stoop to pick it up. But girls are so foolish; they never know what is really for their happiness; and if by any chance there should happen to be some pa.s.sing folly, some fancy of the moment, to come between them and good fortune, everything is lost."

She looked at Clarissa closely as she said this. The girl's face had been changing from red to pale throughout the interview. She was very pale now, but quite self-possessed, and had left off blushing. Had she not given her promise--pledged away her freedom of action with regard to George Fairfax--and thus made an end of everything between them? She felt very calm, but she felt as if she had made a sacrifice. As for Daniel Granger, any reference to him and his admiration for her touched upon the regions of the absurd. Nothing--no friendly manoeuvring of Lady Laura's, no selfish desires of her father's--could ever induce her to listen for a moment to any proposition from that quarter.

She asked her visitor to go into the house presently, in order to put an end to the conversation; and Lady Laura went in to say a few words to Mr. Lovel. They were very melancholy words--all about the dead, and his innumerable virtues--which seemed really at this stage of his history to have been alloyed by no human frailty or shortcoming. Mr. Lovel was sympathetic to the last degree--sighed in unison with his visitor, and brushed some stray drops of moisture from his own eyelids when Lady Laura wept. And then he went out to the carriage with my lady, and saw her drive away, with the blinds discreetly lowered as before.

"What did she come about, Clarissa?" he asked his daughter, while they were going back to the house.

"Only to see me, papa."

"Only to see you! She must have had something very important to say to you, I should think, or she would scarcely have come at such a time."

He glanced at his daughter sharply as he said this, but did not question her farther, though he would have liked to do so. He had a shrewd suspicion that this visit of Lady Laura's bore some reference to George Fairfax. Had there been a row at the Castle? he wondered, and had my lady come to scold her protegee?

"I don't suppose they would show her much mercy if she stood in the way of their schemes," he said to himself. "His brother's death makes this young Fairfax a very decent match. The property must be worth five or six thousand a year--five or six thousand. I wonder what Daniel Granger's income is? Nearer fifty thousand than five, if I may believe what I have been told."

Mr. Granger and his daughter called at Mill Cottage next day: the fair Sophia with a somewhat unwilling aspect, though she was decently civil to Mr. and Miss Lovel. She had protested against the flagrant breach of etiquette in calling on people who had just dined with her, instead of waiting until those diners had discharged their obligation by calling on her; but in vain. Her father had brought her to look at some of Clarissa's sketches, he told his friends.

"I want her to take more interest in landscape art, Mr. Lovel," he said, "and I think your daughter's example may inspire her. Miss Lovel seems to me to have a real genius for landscape. I saw some studies of ferns and underwood that she had done at Hale--full of freedom and of feeling. Sophia doesn't draw badly, but she wants feeling."

The young lady thus coldly commended gave her head rather a supercilious toss as she replied,--

"You must remember that I have higher duties than sketching, papa," she said; "I cannot devote _all_ my existence to ferns and blackberry-bushes."

"O, yes, of course; you've your schools, and that kind of thing; but you might give more time to art than you do, especially if you left the management of the house more to Mrs. Plumptree. I think you waste time and energy upon details."

"I hope I know my duty as mistress of a large establishment, papa, and that I shall never feel the responsibility of administering a large income any less than I do at present. It would be a bad thing for you if I became careless of your interests in order to roam about sketching toadstools and blackberry-bushes."

Mr. Granger looked as if he were rather doubtful upon this point, but it was evidently wisest not to push the discussion too far.

"Will you be so kind as to show us your portfolio, Miss Lovel?" he asked.

"Of course she will," answered her father promptly; "she will only be too happy to exhibit her humble performances to Miss Granger. Bring your drawing-book, Clary."

Clarissa would have given the world to refuse. A drawing-book is in some measure a silent confidante--almost a journal. She did not know how far her random sketches--some of them mere vagabondage of the pencil, jotted down half unconsciously--might betray the secrets of her inner life to the cold eyes of Miss Granger.

"I'd better bring down my finished drawings, papa; those that were mounted for you at Belforet," she said.

"Nonsense, child; Mr. Granger wants to see your rough sketches, not those stiff schoolgirl things, which I suppose were finished by your drawing-master. Bring that book you are always scribbling in. The girl has a kind of pa.s.sion for art," said Mr. Lovel, rather fretfully; "she is seldom without a pencil in her hand. What are you looking for, Clarissa, in that owlish way? There's your book on that table."

He pointed to the volume--Clarissa's other self and perpetual companion--the very book she had been sketching in when George Fairfax surprised her by the churchyard wall. There was no help for it, no disobeying that imperious finger of her father's; so she brought the book meekly and laid it open before Sophia Granger.

The father and daughter turned over the leaves together. It was book of "bits:" ma.s.ses of foliage, bramble, and bird's-nest; here the head of an animal, there the profile of a friend; anon a bit of still life; a vase of flowers, with the arabesqued drapery of a curtain for a background; everywhere the evidence of artistic feeling and a practised hand, everywhere a something much above a schoolgirl's art.

Miss Granger looked through the leaves with an icy air. She was obliged to say, "Very pretty," or "Very clever," once in a way; but this cold praise evidently cost her an effort. Not so her father. He was interested in every page, and criticised everything with a real knowledge of what he was talking about, which made Clarissa feel that he was at least no pretender in his love of art; that he was not a man who bought pictures merely because he was rich and picture-buying was the right thing to do.

They came presently to the pages Clarissa had covered at Hale Castle--bits of familiar landscape, glimpses of still life in the Castle rooms, and lightly-touched portraits of the Castle guests. There was one head that appeared very much oftener than others, and Clarissa felt herself blushing a deeper red every time Mr. Granger paused to contemplate this particular likeness.

He lingered longer over each of these sketches, with rather a puzzled air, and though the execution of these heads was very spirited, he forbore to praise.

"There is one face here that I see a good deal of, Miss Lovel," he said at last. "I think it is Mr. Fairfax, is it not?"

Clarissa looked at a profile of George Fairfax dubiously.

"Yes, I believe I meant that for Mr. Fairfax; his is a very easy face to draw, much easier than Lady Geraldine's, though her features are so regular. All my portraits of her are failures."

"I have only seen one attempt at Lady Geraldine's portrait in this book, Miss Lovel," said Sophia.

"I have some more on loose sheets of paper, somewhere; and then I generally destroy my failures, if they are quite hopeless."

"Mr. Fairfax would be quite flattered if he could see how often you have sketched him," Sophia continued blandly.

Clarissa thought of the leaf George Fairfax had cut out of her drawing-book; a recollection which did not serve to diminish her embarra.s.sment.

"I daresay Mr. Fairfax is quite vain enough without any flattery of that kind," said Mr. Lovel. "And now that you have exhibited your rough sketches, you can bring those mounted drawings, if you like, Clarissa."