“Now, please sit down and talk a little,” said Lucilla; “I am so proud of having you both together. There never has been anybody in the world that I have missed so much as you—you knew that when you went away, but you didn’t mind. Mr. Ashburton is very nice, but he is of no use to speak of in an evening,” said Miss Marjoribanks, turning a reflective glance upon her own candidate with a certain sadness; and then they both laughed as if it was a joke; but it was no joke, as one of them at least must have known.
“Lucilla,” said Mrs. John, with consternation, “I never heard anybody talk as you do; I am sure Mr. Ashburton is the very best of society, and as for Mr. Cavendish—”
“Dear Aunt Jemima,” said Lucilla, “would you mind ringing the bell? I have been sitting to Maria Brown, and I am almost fainting. I wish you gentlemen would sit to her; it would please her, and it would not do you much harm; and then for your constituents, you know—”
“I hope you don’t wish me to look like one of Maria Brown’s photographs to my constituents,” said Mr. Cavendish; “but then I am happy to say they all know me pretty well.” This was said with a slight touch of gentlemanly spite, if there is such a thing; for, after all, he was an old power in Carlingford, though he had been so long away.
“Yes,” said Lucilla reflectively, “but you are a little changed since then; a little perhaps—just a little—stouter, and—”
“Gone off?” said Mr. Cavendish, with a laugh; but he felt horribly disconcerted all the same, and savage with Miss Marjoribanks, and could not think why “that fellow” did not go away. What had he to do in Lucilla’s drawing-room? what did he mean by sitting down again and talking in that measured way to the old lady, as if all the ordinary rules of good breeding did not point out to him that he should have gone away and left the field clear?
“Oh, you know it does not matter for a gentleman,” said Lucilla; and then she turned to Mr. Ashburton—“I am sure the Major wants to see you, and he thinks that it was he who put it into your head to stand. He was here that day at lunch, you know, and it was something he said—”
“Quite true,” said Mr. Ashburton in his business way. “I shall go to see him at once. Thank you for telling me of it, Miss Marjoribanks; I shall go as soon as I leave here.”
And then Mr. Cavendish laughed. “This is what I call interesting,” he said. “I hope Mr. Ashburton sees the fun; but it is trying to an old friend to hear of that day at lunch, you know. I remember when these sort of allusions used to be pleasant enough; but when one has been banished for a thousand years—”
“Yes,” said Lucilla, “one leaves all that behind, you know—one leaves ever so many things behind. I wish we could always be twenty, for my part. I always said, you know, that I should be gone off in ten years.”
“Was it the only fib you ever told that you repeat it so?” said Mr. Cavendish; and it was with this pretty speech that he took her downstairs to the well-remembered luncheon. “But you have gone off in some things when you have to do with a prig like that,” he said in her ear, as they went down together, “and cast off old friends. It was a thing a fellow did not expect of you.”
“I never cast off old friends,” said Miss Marjoribanks. “We shall look for you on Thursday, you know, all the same. Must you go, Mr. Ashburton, when lunch is on the table? But then, to be sure, you will be in time at the Browns’,” said Lucilla sweetly, and she gave the one rival her hand while she held the arm of the other, at the door of the dining-room, in which Mr. Ashburton had gallantly deposited Aunt Jemima before saying goodbye. They were both looking a little black, though the gloom was moderate in Mr. Ashburton’s case; but as for Lucilla, she stood between them a picture of angelic sweetness and goodness, giving a certain measure of her sympathy to both—Woman the Reconciler, by the side of those other characters of Inspirer and Consoler, of which the world has heard. The two inferior creatures scowled with politeness at each other, but Miss Marjoribanks smiled upon them both. Such was the way in which she overcame the difficulties of the meeting. Mr. Ashburton went away a little annoyed, but still understanding his instructions, and ready to act upon them in that businesslike way he had, and Mr. Cavendish remained, faintly reassured in the midst of his soreness and mortification, by at least having the field to himself and seeing the last (for the present) of his antagonist—which was a kind of victory in its way.
“I thought I knew you better than to think you ever would have anything to do with that sort of thing,” said Mr. Cavendish. “There are people, you know, whom I could have imagined—but a prig like that.” He became indeed quite violent, as Aunt Jemima said afterwards, and met with that lady’s decided disapproval, as may be supposed.
“Mr. Ashburton is very well-bred and agreeable,” Mrs. John said, with emphasis. “I wish all the young men I see nowadays were as nice.”
“Young men!” said Mr. Cavendish. “Is that what people call young nowadays? And he must be insane, you know, or he would never dream of representing a town without saying a single word about his
