“My dear Celia, how am I to know what constitutes your idea of perfect loveliness in a young man? I have heard you praise so many, all distinctly different. I told you that Mr. Treverton was gentlemanlike and good-looking.”
“Good-looking,” cried Celia, “he is absolutely perfect. To see him sitting in that chair drinking tea and looking dreamily out of the garden with those exquisite eyes of his! Oh, he is quite too awfully nice. Do you know the colour of his eyes?”
“I have not the slightest idea.”
“They are a greeny-grey—a colour that changes every minute, a tint between blue and brown; I never saw it before. And his complexion—just that olive paleness which is so positively delightful. His nose is slightly irregular in line, not straight enough to be Grecian, and not curved enough to be aquiline—but his mouth is awfully nice—so firm and resolute-looking, yet lapsing now and then into dreamy thought. Did you see him lapse into dreamy thought, Laura?”
Miss Malcolm blushed indignantly; vexed, no doubt, at such foolishness.
“Really, Celia, you are too ridiculous. I can’t think how you can indulge in such absurd raptures about a strange man.”
“Why not about a strange man?” asked Celia with her philosophical air. “Why should the perfections of a strange man be a forbidden subject? One may rave about a landscape; one may be as enthusiastic as one likes about the stars or the moon, the sea, or a sunset, or even the last popular novel! Why must not one admire a man? I am not going to put a padlock upon my lips to flatter such an absurd prejudice. As for you, Laura, it is all very well to sit there stitching at that faded blackberry leaf—you are putting too much brown in it I am sure—and looking the image of all that is demure. To my mind you are more to be envied than any girl I ever heard of, except the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.”
“Why should I be envied?”
“Because you are to have a splendid fortune, and John Treverton for your husband.”
“Celia, I shall be so grateful to you if you will be quite silent on that subject, supposing that you can be silent about anything.”
“I can’t,” said Celia, frankly.
“It is by no means certain that I shall marry Mr. Treverton.”
“Would you be so utterly idiotic as to refuse him?”
“I would not accept him unless I could believe that he really liked me—better than any other woman he had ever seen.”
“And, of course he will; of course he does,” cried Celia. “You know, as a matter of personal inclination, I would much rather you should marry poor Edward, who adores the ground you walk upon, and, of course, adores you much more than the ground. But there is a limpness about Ted’s character which makes me fear that he will never get on in the world. He is a clever young man, and he thinks that he has nothing to do but go on being clever, and write verses for the magazines—which even I, as his sister, must confess are the weakest dilution of Swinburne—and that Fame will come and take him by the hand, and lead him up the steps of her temple, while Fortune will meet him in the portico with a big bag of gold. No, Laura, dearly as I love Ted, I should be sorry to see you sacrifice a splendid fortune, and refuse such a man as John Treverton.”
“There will be time enough to debate the question when Mr. Treverton asks me to marry him,” said Laura, gravely.
“Oh, that will come upon you all in a moment,” retorted Celia, “when you won’t have me to help you. You had better make up your mind beforehand.”
“I should despise Mr. Treverton if he were to make me an offer before he knew a great deal more of me than he does now. But I forbid you to talk any more of this, Celia. And now we had better go and walk in the orchard for half an hour or you will never be able to digest all the cake you have eaten.”
“What a pity digestion should be so difficult, when eating is so easy,” said Celia.
And then she went dancing along the garden paths with the airy lightness of a nymph, who had never known the meaning of indigestion.
Once more John Treverton drove round his late kinsman’s estate, and this second time, in the sweet spring weather, the farms and homesteads, the meadows where the buttercups were beginning to show golden among the grass, the broad sweeps of arable land where the young corn was growing tall—seemed to him a hundredfold more fair than they had seemed in the winter. He felt a keener longing to be the master of all these things. It seemed to him as if no life could be so sweet as the life he might lead at Hazlehurst Manor, with Laura Malcolm for his wife.
The life he might lead—if—
What was that “if” which barred the way to perfect bliss?
There was more than one obstacle, he told himself gloomily, as he paced the elm avenue on the London road, one evening at sunset, after he had been at Hazlehurst more than a week, during which week he had seen Laura very often.
There was, among many questions, the doubt as to Laura’s liking for him. She might consider herself, constrained to accept him, were he to offer himself, in deference to the wish of her adopted father; but could he ever feel sure that she really cared for him, that he was the one man upon earth whom she would choose for her husband?
A flattering whisper which crept into the ear of his mind, like a caressing breath of summer wind gently fanning his cheek, told him that he was already something nearer and dearer to this sweet girl than the ruck of mankind; that her lovely hazel eyes took a new light and
