"Puritan, after so many years of a French convent?"
"Yes, Puritan: no word suits you half so well! There is a sort of restrained life and gladness about you, and it is the restraint that gives it its attraction! Oh, forgive me for speaking so frankly; but when I see you I forget that I have not known you for years and years! I feel somehow as if we had been friends all our life!"
"And so do I," said Lesley, surrendering herself to the spell, and letting Ethel take both her hands and look into her face. "But you are not at all like the English girls I expected to meet! I thought they were all cold and stiff!"
"Have you never seen an English girl before, dear?"
"Yes, but I have had no English girl friend. I never talked to an English girl before as I am talking to you."
"Oh, how charming!" said Ethel. "And I never before talked to a girl who had lived in a convent! We are each a new experience to the other! What a basis for friendship!"
"Do you think so?" said Lesley. "I should have thought the opposite—that what is old and well-tried and established is the best to found a friendship upon."
She spoke half sadly, with a memory of her parents and her own relations with her father in her mind. Ethel gave her a shrewd glance, but made no direct reply. She was a young woman of marvellously quick intuitions, and she saw at once that Lesley's training had not fitted her to take up her position in the Brooke household very easily.
When she went home she turned this matter over in her mind a good many times; and was so absorbed in her reflections that her brother had to ask her twice what she was thinking about before she answered him.
"I was thinking about Lesley Brooke," she answered promptly.