Kitabı oku: «Two on a Tower», sayfa 14

XXVII

All night the astronomer’s mind was on the stretch with curiosity as to what the Bishop could wish to say to him. A dozen conjectures entered his brain, to be abandoned in turn as unlikely. That which finally seemed the most plausible was that the Bishop, having become interested in his pursuits, and entertaining friendly recollections of his father, was going to ask if he could do anything to help him on in the profession he had chosen. Should this be the case, thought the suddenly sanguine youth, it would seem like an encouragement to that spirit of firmness which had led him to reject his late uncle’s offer because it involved the renunciation of Lady Constantine.

At last he fell asleep; and when he awoke it was so late that the hour was ready to solve what conjecture could not. After a hurried breakfast he paced across the fields, entering the churchyard by the south gate precisely at the appointed minute.

The inclosure was well adapted for a private interview, being bounded by bushes of laurel and alder nearly on all sides. He looked round; the Bishop was not there, nor any living creature save himself. Swithin sat down upon a tombstone to await Bishop Helmsdale’s arrival.

While he sat he fancied he could hear voices in conversation not far off, and further attention convinced him that they came from Lady Constantine’s lawn, which was divided from the churchyard by a high wall and shrubbery only. As the Bishop still delayed his coming, though the time was nearly eleven, and as the lady whose sweet voice mingled with those heard from the lawn was his personal property, Swithin became exceedingly curious to learn what was going on within that screened promenade. A way of doing so occurred to him. The key was in the church door; he opened it, entered, and ascended to the ringers’ loft in the west tower. At the back of this was a window commanding a full view of Viviette’s garden front.

The flowers were all in gayest bloom, and the creepers on the walls of the house were bursting into tufts of young green. A broad gravel-walk ran from end to end of the facade, terminating in a large conservatory. In the walk were three people pacing up and down. Lady Constantine’s was the central figure, her brother being on one side of her, and on the other a stately form in a corded shovel-hat of glossy beaver and black breeches. This was the Bishop. Viviette carried over her shoulder a sunshade lined with red, which she twirled idly. They were laughing and chatting gaily, and when the group approached the churchyard many of their remarks entered the silence of the church tower through the ventilator of the window.

The conversation was general, yet interesting enough to Swithin. At length Louis stepped upon the grass and picked up something that had lain there, which turned out to be a bowl: throwing it forward he took a second, and bowled it towards the first, or jack. The Bishop, who seemed to be in a sprightly mood, followed suit, and bowled one in a curve towards the jack, turning and speaking to Lady Constantine as he concluded the feat. As she had not left the gravelled terrace he raised his voice, so that the words reached Swithin distinctly.

‘Do you follow us?’ he asked gaily.

‘I am not skilful,’ she said. ‘I always bowl narrow.’

The Bishop meditatively paused.

‘This moment reminds one of the scene in Richard the Second,’ he said. ‘I mean the Duke of York’s garden, where the queen and her two ladies play, and the queen says —

 
“What sport shall we devise here in this garden,
To drive away the heavy thought of care?”
 

To which her lady answers, “Madam, we’ll play at bowls.”’

‘That’s an unfortunate quotation for you,’ said Lady Constantine; ‘for if I don’t forget, the queen declines, saying, “Twill make me think the world is full of rubs, and that my fortune runs against the bias.”’

‘Then I cite mal à propos. But it is an interesting old game, and might have been played at that very date on this very green.’

The Bishop lazily bowled another, and while he was doing it Viviette’s glance rose by accident to the church tower window, where she recognized Swithin’s face. Her surprise was only momentary; and waiting till both her companions’ backs were turned she smiled and blew him a kiss. In another minute she had another opportunity, and blew him another; afterwards blowing him one a third time.

Her blowings were put a stop to by the Bishop and Louis throwing down the bowls and rejoining her in the path, the house clock at the moment striking half-past eleven.

‘This is a fine way of keeping an engagement,’ said Swithin to himself. ‘I have waited an hour while you indulge in those trifles!’

He fumed, turned, and behold somebody was at his elbow: Tabitha Lark. Swithin started, and said, ‘How did you come here, Tabitha?’

‘In the course of my calling, Mr. St. Cleeve,’ said the smiling girl. ‘I come to practise on the organ. When I entered I saw you up here through the tower arch, and I crept up to see what you were looking at. The Bishop is a striking man, is he not?’

‘Yes, rather,’ said Swithin.

‘I think he is much devoted to Lady Constantine, and I am glad of it. Aren’t you?’

‘O yes – very,’ said Swithin, wondering if Tabitha had seen the tender little salutes between Lady Constantine and himself.

‘I don’t think she cares much for him,’ added Tabitha judicially. ‘Or, even if she does, she could be got away from him in no time by a younger man.’

‘Pooh, that’s nothing,’ said Swithin impatiently.

Tabitha then remarked that her blower had not come to time, and that she must go to look for him; upon which she descended the stairs, and left Swithin again alone.

A few minutes later the Bishop suddenly looked at his watch, Lady Constantine having withdrawn towards the house. Apparently apologizing to Louis the Bishop came down the terrace, and through the door into the churchyard. Swithin hastened downstairs and joined him in the path under the sunny wall of the aisle.

Their glances met, and it was with some consternation that Swithin beheld the change that a few short minutes had wrought in that episcopal countenance. On the lawn with Lady Constantine the rays of an almost perpetual smile had brightened his dark aspect like flowers in a shady place: now the smile was gone as completely as yesterday; the lines of his face were firm; his dark eyes and whiskers were overspread with gravity; and, as he gazed upon Swithin from the repose of his stable figure it was like an evangelized King of Spades come to have it out with the Knave of Hearts.

* * * * *

To return for a moment to Louis Glanville. He had been somewhat struck with the abruptness of the Bishop’s departure, and more particularly by the circumstance that he had gone away by the private door into the churchyard instead of by the regular exit on the other side. True, great men were known to suffer from absence of mind, and Bishop Helmsdale, having a dim sense that he had entered by that door yesterday, might have unconsciously turned thitherward now. Louis, upon the whole, thought little of the matter, and being now left quite alone on the lawn, he seated himself in an arbour and began smoking.

The arbour was situated against the churchyard wall. The atmosphere was as still as the air of a hot-house; only fourteen inches of brickwork divided Louis from the scene of the Bishop’s interview with St. Cleeve, and as voices on the lawn had been audible to Swithin in the churchyard, voices in the churchyard could be heard without difficulty from that close corner of the lawn. No sooner had Louis lit a cigar than the dialogue began.

‘Ah, you are here, St. Cleeve,’ said the Bishop, hardly replying to Swithin’s good morning. ‘I fear I am a little late. Well, my request to you to meet me may have seemed somewhat unusual, seeing that we were strangers till a few hours ago.’

‘I don’t mind that, if your lordship wishes to see me.’

‘I thought it best to see you regarding your confirmation yesterday; and my reason for taking a more active step with you than I should otherwise have done is that I have some interest in you through having known your father when we were undergraduates. His rooms were on the same staircase with mine at All Angels, and we were friendly till time and affairs separated us even more completely than usually happens. However, about your presenting yourself for confirmation.’ (The Bishop’s voice grew stern.) ‘If I had known yesterday morning what I knew twelve hours later, I wouldn’t have confirmed you at all.’

‘Indeed, my lord!’

‘Yes, I say it, and I mean it. I visited your observatory last night.’

‘You did, my lord.’

‘In inspecting it I noticed something which I may truly describe as extraordinary. I have had young men present themselves to me who turned out to be notoriously unfit, either from giddiness, from being profane or intemperate, or from some bad quality or other. But I never remember a case which equalled the cool culpability of this. While infringing the first principles of social decorum you might at least have respected the ordinance sufficiently to have stayed away from it altogether. Now I have sent for you here to see if a last entreaty and a direct appeal to your sense of manly uprightness will have any effect in inducing you to change your course of life.’

The voice of Swithin in his next remark showed how tremendously this attack of the Bishop had told upon his feelings. Louis, of course, did not know the reason why the words should have affected him precisely as they did; to any one in the secret the double embarrassment arising from misapprehended ethics and inability to set matters right, because his word of secrecy to another was inviolable, would have accounted for the young man’s emotion sufficiently well.

‘I am very sorry your lordship should have seen anything objectionable,’ said Swithin. ‘May I ask what it was?’

‘You know what it was. Something in your chamber, which forced me to the above conclusions. I disguised my feelings of sorrow at the time for obvious reasons, but I never in my whole life was so shocked!’

‘At what, my lord?’

‘At what I saw.’

‘Pardon me, Bishop Helmsdale, but you said just now that we are strangers; so what you saw in my cabin concerns me only.’

‘There I contradict you. Twenty-four hours ago that remark would have been plausible enough; but by presenting yourself for confirmation at my hands you have invited my investigation into your principles.’

Swithin sighed. ‘I admit it,’ he said.

‘And what do I find them?’

‘You say reprehensible. But you might at least let me hear the proof!’

‘I can do more, sir. I can let you see it!’

There was a pause. Louis Glanville was so highly interested that he stood upon the seat of the arbour, and looked through the leafage over the wall. The Bishop had produced an article from his pocket.

‘What is it?’ said Swithin, laboriously scrutinizing the thing.

‘Why, don’t you see?’ said the Bishop, holding it out between his finger and thumb in Swithin’s face. ‘A bracelet, – a coral bracelet. I found the wanton object on the bed in your cabin! And of the sex of the owner there can be no doubt. More than that, she was concealed behind the curtains, for I saw them move.’ In the decision of his opinion the Bishop threw the coral bracelet down on a tombstone.

‘Nobody was in my room, my lord, who had not a perfect right to be there,’ said the younger man.

‘Well, well, that’s a matter of assertion. Now don’t get into a passion, and say to me in your haste what you’ll repent of saying afterwards.’

‘I am not in a passion, I assure your lordship. I am too sad for passion.’

‘Very well; that’s a hopeful sign. Now I would ask you, as one man of another, do you think that to come to me, the Bishop of this large and important diocese, as you came yesterday, and pretend to be something that you are not, is quite upright conduct, leave alone religious? Think it over. We may never meet again. But bear in mind what your Bishop and spiritual head says to you, and see if you cannot mend before it is too late.’

Swithin was meek as Moses, but he tried to appear sturdy. ‘My lord, I am in a difficult position,’ he said mournfully; ‘how difficult, nobody but myself can tell. I cannot explain; there are insuperable reasons against it. But will you take my word of assurance that I am not so bad as I seem? Some day I will prove it. Till then I only ask you to suspend your judgment on me.’

The Bishop shook his head incredulously and went towards the vicarage, as if he had lost his hearing. Swithin followed him with his eyes, and Louis followed the direction of Swithin’s. Before the Bishop had reached the vicarage entrance Lady Constantine crossed in front of him. She had a basket on her arm, and was, in fact, going to visit some of the poorer cottages. Who could believe the Bishop now to be the same man that he had been a moment before? The darkness left his face as if he had come out of a cave; his look was all sweetness, and shine, and gaiety, as he again greeted Viviette.

XXVIII

The conversation which arose between the Bishop and Lady Constantine was of that lively and reproductive kind which cannot be ended during any reasonable halt of two people going in opposite directions. He turned, and walked with her along the laurel-screened lane that bordered the churchyard, till their voices died away in the distance. Swithin then aroused himself from his thoughtful regard of them, and went out of the churchyard by another gate.

Seeing himself now to be left alone on the scene, Louis Glanville descended from his post of observation in the arbour. He came through the private doorway, and on to that spot among the graves where the Bishop and St. Cleeve had conversed. On the tombstone still lay the coral bracelet which Dr. Helmsdale had flung down there in his indignation; for the agitated, introspective mood into which Swithin had been thrown had banished from his mind all thought of securing the trinket and putting it in his pocket.

Louis picked up the little red scandal-breeding thing, and while walking on with it in his hand he observed Tabitha Lark approaching the church, in company with the young blower whom she had gone in search of to inspire her organ-practising within. Louis immediately put together, with that rare diplomatic keenness of which he was proud, the little scene he had witnessed between Tabitha and Swithin during the confirmation, and the Bishop’s stern statement as to where he had found the bracelet. He had no longer any doubt that it belonged to her.

‘Poor girl!’ he said to himself, and sang in an undertone —

 
‘Tra deri, dera,
L’histoire n’est pas nouvelle!’
 

When she drew nearer Louis called her by name. She sent the boy into the church, and came forward, blushing at having been called by so fine a gentleman. Louis held out the bracelet.

‘Here is something I have found, or somebody else has found,’ he said to her. ‘I won’t state where. Put it away, and say no more about it. I will not mention it either. Now go on into the church where you are going, and may Heaven have mercy on your soul, my dear.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Tabitha, with some perplexity, yet inclined to be pleased, and only recognizing in the situation the fact that Lady Constantine’s humorous brother was making her a present.

‘You are much obliged to me?’

‘O yes!’

‘Well, Miss Lark, I’ve discovered a secret, you see.’

‘What may that be, Mr. Glanville?’

‘That you are in love.’

‘I don’t admit it, sir. Who told you so?’

‘Nobody. Only I put two and two together. Now take my advice. Beware of lovers! They are a bad lot, and bring young women to tears.’

‘Some do, I dare say. But some don’t.’

‘And you think that in your particular case the latter alternative will hold good? We generally think we shall be lucky ourselves, though all the world before us, in the same situation, have been otherwise.’

‘O yes, or we should die outright of despair.’

‘Well, I don’t think you will be lucky in your case.’

‘Please how do you know so much, since my case has not yet arrived?’ asked Tabitha, tossing her head a little disdainfully, but less than she might have done if he had not obtained a charter for his discourse by giving her the bracelet.

‘Fie, Tabitha!’

‘I tell you it has not arrived!’ she said, with some anger. ‘I have not got a lover, and everybody knows I haven’t, and it’s an insinuating thing for you to say so!’

Louis laughed, thinking how natural it was that a girl should so emphatically deny circumstances that would not bear curious inquiry.

‘Why, of course I meant myself,’ he said soothingly. ‘So, then, you will not accept me?’

‘I didn’t know you meant yourself,’ she replied. ‘But I won’t accept you. And I think you ought not to jest on such subjects.’

‘Well, perhaps not. However, don’t let the Bishop see your bracelet, and all will be well. But mind, lovers are deceivers.’

Tabitha laughed, and they parted, the girl entering the church. She had been feeling almost certain that, having accidentally found the bracelet somewhere, he had presented it in a whim to her as the first girl he met. Yet now she began to have momentary doubts whether he had not been labouring under a mistake, and had imagined her to be the owner. The bracelet was not valuable; it was, in fact, a mere toy, – the pair of which this was one being a little present made to Lady Constantine by Swithin on the day of their marriage; and she had not worn them with sufficient frequency out of doors for Tabitha to recognize either as positively her ladyship’s. But when, out of sight of the blower, the girl momentarily tried it on, in a corner by the organ, it seemed to her that the ornament was possibly Lady Constantine’s. Now that the pink beads shone before her eyes on her own arm she remembered having seen a bracelet with just such an effect gracing the wrist of Lady Constantine upon one occasion. A temporary self-surrender to the sophism that if Mr. Louis Glanville chose to give away anything belonging to his sister, she, Tabitha, had a right to take it without question, was soon checked by a resolve to carry the tempting strings of coral to her ladyship that evening, and inquire the truth about them. This decided on she slipped the bracelet into her pocket, and played her voluntaries with a light heart.

* * * * *

Bishop Helmsdale did not tear himself away from Welland till about two o’clock that afternoon, which was three hours later than he had intended to leave. It was with a feeling of relief that Swithin, looking from the top of the tower, saw the carriage drive out from the vicarage into the turnpike road, and whirl the right reverend gentleman again towards Warborne. The coast being now clear of him Swithin meditated how to see Viviette, and explain what had happened. With this in view he waited where he was till evening came on.

Meanwhile Lady Constantine and her brother dined by themselves at Welland House. They had not met since the morning, and as soon as they were left alone Louis said, ‘You have done very well so far; but you might have been a little warmer.’

‘Done well?’ she asked, with surprise.

‘Yes, with the Bishop. The difficult question is how to follow up our advantage. How are you to keep yourself in sight of him?’

‘Heavens, Louis! You don’t seriously mean that the Bishop of Melchester has any feelings for me other than friendly?’

‘Viviette, this is affectation. You know he has as well as I do.’

She sighed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I own I had a suspicion of the same thing. What a misfortune!’

‘A misfortune? Surely the world is turned upside down! You will drive me to despair about our future if you see things so awry. Exert yourself to do something, so as to make of this accident a stepping-stone to higher things. The gentleman will give us the slip if we don’t pursue the friendship at once.’

‘I cannot have you talk like this,’ she cried impatiently. ‘I have no more thought of the Bishop than I have of the Pope. I would much rather not have had him here to lunch at all. You said it would be necessary to do it, and an opportunity, and I thought it my duty to show some hospitality when he was coming so near, Mr. Torkingham’s house being so small. But of course I understood that the opportunity would be one for you in getting to know him, your prospects being so indefinite at present; not one for me.’

‘If you don’t follow up this chance of being spiritual queen of Melchester, you will never have another of being anything. Mind this, Viviette: you are not so young as you were. You are getting on to be a middle-aged woman, and your black hair is precisely of the sort which time quickly turns grey. You must make up your mind to grizzled bachelors or widowers. Young marriageable men won’t look at you; or if they do just now, in a year or two more they’ll despise you as an antiquated party.’

Lady Constantine perceptibly paled. ‘Young men what?’ she asked. ‘Say that again.’

‘I said it was no use to think of young men; they won’t look at you much longer; or if they do, it will be to look away again very quickly.’

‘You imply that if I were to marry a man younger than myself he would speedily acquire a contempt for me? How much younger must a man be than his wife – to get that feeling for her?’ She was resting her elbow on the chair as she faintly spoke the words, and covered her eyes with her hand.

‘An exceedingly small number of years,’ said Louis drily. ‘Now the Bishop is at least fifteen years older than you, and on that account, no less than on others, is an excellent match. You would be head of the church in this diocese: what more can you require after these years of miserable obscurity? In addition, you would escape that minor thorn in the flesh of bishops’ wives, of being only “Mrs.” while their husbands are peers.’

She was not listening; his previous observation still detained her thoughts.

‘Louis,’ she said, ‘in the case of a woman marrying a man much younger than herself, does he get to dislike her, even if there has been a social advantage to him in the union?’

‘Yes, – not a whit less. Ask any person of experience. But what of that? Let’s talk of our own affairs. You say you have no thought of the Bishop. And yet if he had stayed here another day or two he would have proposed to you straight off.’

‘Seriously, Louis, I could not accept him.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t love him.’

‘Oh, oh, I like those words!’ cried Louis, throwing himself back in his chair and looking at the ceiling in satirical enjoyment. ‘A woman who at two-and-twenty married for convenience, at thirty talks of not marrying without love; the rule of inverse, that is, in which more requires less, and less requires more. As your only brother, older than yourself, and more experienced, I insist that you encourage the Bishop.’

‘Don’t quarrel with me, Louis!’ she said piteously. ‘We don’t know that he thinks anything of me, – we only guess.’

‘I know it, – and you shall hear how I know. I am of a curious and conjectural nature, as you are aware. Last night, when everybody had gone to bed, I stepped out for a five minutes’ smoke on the lawn, and walked down to where you get near the vicarage windows. While I was there in the dark one of them opened, and Bishop Helmsdale leant out. The illuminated oblong of your window shone him full in the face between the trees, and presently your shadow crossed it. He waved his hand, and murmured some tender words, though what they were exactly I could not hear.’

‘What a vague, imaginary story, – as if he could know my shadow! Besides, a man of the Bishop’s dignity wouldn’t have done such a thing. When I knew him as a younger man he was not at all romantic, and he’s not likely to have grown so now.’

‘That’s just what he is likely to have done. No lover is so extreme a specimen of the species as an old lover. Come, Viviette, no more of this fencing. I have entered into the project heart and soul – so much that I have postponed my departure till the matter is well under way.’

‘Louis – my dear Louis – you will bring me into some disagreeable position!’ said she, clasping her hands. ‘I do entreat you not to interfere or do anything rash about me. The step is impossible. I have something to tell you some day. I must live on, and endure – ’

‘Everything except this penury,’ replied Louis, unmoved. ‘Come, I have begun the campaign by inviting Bishop Helmsdale, and I’ll take the responsibility of carrying it on. All I ask of you is not to make a ninny of yourself. Come, give me your promise!’

‘No, I cannot, – I don’t know how to! I only know one thing, – that I am in no hurry – ’

‘“No hurry” be hanged! Agree, like a good sister, to charm the Bishop.’

‘I must consider!’ she replied, with perturbed evasiveness.

It being a fine evening Louis went out of the house to enjoy his cigar in the shrubbery. On reaching his favourite seat he found he had left his cigar-case behind him; he immediately returned for it. When he approached the window by which he had emerged he saw Swithin St. Cleeve standing there in the dusk, talking to Viviette inside.

St. Cleeve’s back was towards Louis, but, whether at a signal from her or by accident, he quickly turned and recognized Glanville; whereupon raising his hat to Lady Constantine the young man passed along the terrace-walk and out by the churchyard door.

Louis rejoined his sister. ‘I didn’t know you allowed your lawn to be a public thoroughfare for the parish,’ he said.

‘I am not exclusive, especially since I have been so poor,’ replied she.

‘Then do you let everybody pass this way, or only that illustrious youth because he is so good-looking?’

‘I have no strict rule in the case. Mr. St. Cleeve is an acquaintance of mine, and he can certainly come here if he chooses.’ Her colour rose somewhat, and she spoke warmly.

Louis was too cautious a bird to reveal to her what had suddenly dawned upon his mind – that his sister, in common with the (to his thinking) unhappy Tabitha Lark, had been foolish enough to get interested in this phenomenon of the parish, this scientific Adonis. But he resolved to cure at once her tender feeling, if it existed, by letting out a secret which would inflame her dignity against the weakness.

‘A good-looking young man,’ he said, with his eyes where Swithin had vanished. ‘But not so good as he looks. In fact a regular young sinner.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, only a little feature I discovered in St. Cleeve’s history. But I suppose he has a right to sow his wild oats as well as other young men.’

‘Tell me what you allude to, – do, Louis.’

‘It is hardly fit that I should. However, the case is amusing enough. I was sitting in the arbour to-day, and was an unwilling listener to the oddest interview I ever heard of. Our friend the Bishop discovered, when we visited the observatory last night, that our astronomer was not alone in his seclusion. A lady shared his romantic cabin with him; and finding this, the Bishop naturally enough felt that the ordinance of confirmation had been profaned. So his lordship sent for Master Swithin this morning, and meeting him in the churchyard read him such an excommunicating lecture as I warrant he won’t forget in his lifetime. Ha-ha-ha! ’Twas very good, – very.’

He watched her face narrowly while he spoke with such seeming carelessness. Instead of the agitation of jealousy that he had expected to be aroused by this hint of another woman in the case, there was a curious expression, more like embarrassment than anything else which might have been fairly attributed to the subject. ‘Can it be that I am mistaken?’ he asked himself.

The possibility that he might be mistaken restored Louis to good-humour, and lights having been brought he sat with his sister for some time, talking with purpose of Swithin’s low rank on one side, and the sordid struggles that might be in store for him. St. Cleeve being in the unhappy case of deriving his existence through two channels of society, it resulted that he seemed to belong to either this or that according to the altitude of the beholder. Louis threw the light entirely on Swithin’s agricultural side, bringing out old Mrs. Martin and her connexions and her ways of life with luminous distinctness, till Lady Constantine became greatly depressed. She, in her hopefulness, had almost forgotten, latterly, that the bucolic element, so incisively represented by Messrs. Hezzy Biles, Haymoss Fry, Sammy Blore, and the rest entered into his condition at all; to her he had been the son of his academic father alone.

But she would not reveal the depression to which she had been subjected by this resuscitation of the homely half of poor Swithin, presently putting an end to the subject by walking hither and thither about the room.

‘What have you lost?’ said Louis, observing her movements.

‘Nothing of consequence, – a bracelet.’

‘Coral?’ he inquired calmly.

‘Yes. How did you know it was coral? You have never seen it, have you?’

He was about to make answer; but the amazed enlightenment which her announcement had produced in him through knowing where the Bishop had found such an article, led him to reconsider himself. Then, like an astute man, by no means sure of the dimensions of the intrigue he might be uncovering, he said carelessly, ‘I found such a one in the churchyard to-day. But I thought it appeared to be of no great rarity, and I gave it to one of the village girls who was passing by.’

‘Did she take it? Who was she?’ said the unsuspecting Viviette.

‘Really, I don’t remember. I suppose it is of no consequence?’

‘O no; its value is nothing, comparatively. It was only one of a pair such as young girls wear.’ Lady Constantine could not add that, in spite of this, she herself valued it as being Swithin’s present, and the best he could afford.

Panic-struck by his ruminations, although revealing nothing by his manner, Louis soon after went up to his room, professedly to write letters. He gave vent to a low whistle when he was out of hearing. He of course remembered perfectly well to whom he had given the corals, and resolved to seek out Tabitha the next morning to ascertain whether she could possibly have owned such a trinket as well as his sister, – which at present he very greatly doubted, though fervently hoping that she might.