My darling, lovely girl. That was what his eyes were always saying, and oh! it was sweet!
It must be yes or no! She told herself that if she couldn’t say yes, it was still more impossible to say no. Backwards and forwards she struggled with the insolvable problem, till her tallow candle expired with a great stench, and she was left in darkness and misery. Worn out with her long day she fell at last asleep, to be wakened by the call of a cock in Shepherd’s Market. Perhaps it was this farmyard cry which, weaving into her consciousness, had made her dream so strongly of the old place at home. When she woke she could hardly believe she was not in the billowing four-poster in the great attic, with pretty Sister Susie asleep beside her.
Again the cold, foggy, bleak London morning was rent by the crow of the cock. Then Pamela knew where she was, and she knew something else, too.
That other self which had got into her must not be listened to on any account. It must indeed be stamped out of existence with the utmost promptitude.
Now Pamela was considerably wiser than most young women in her position. She took a sensible resolution.
“I’ll go to Mrs. Mirabel this very morning,” she decided, “and ask for a Christmas holiday. She won’t refuse me, being the good-natured soul she is, and me so useful to her. And once I get home and feel mother’s arms about me—there! I know I’ll be all right. I needn’t be afraid of myself any more.”
Pamela Pounce took seat in the Dover coach. She was in a sedate flutter, an admirably dignified bustle. She knew to the fraction of an inch the amount of space to which she was entitled, and she possessed herself of it determinedly. She had, besides her own agreeable person, divers bandboxes and loose parcels to place, and this she did with an amiable assurance that put protest to the blush, and set other passengers’ pretensions in a gross light. When her arrangements were concluded she heaved a sigh, presented a vague smile, and lay back, her hands folded, to survey the other travellers at leisure. She was herself better worth looking at than any of the coach-load, which contained a foreign couple, one or two of the usual bagmen on the road to France, a Dover shopkeeper, a farmer’s wife, and an elderly gentleman of delicate and serious mien, who drew an old calf-bound volume from a shabby bag, and fixed large gold-mounted spectacles upon his high, transparent nose with all the air of one prepared with solace for the journey.
But as he sat exactly opposite Miss Pamela Pounce, his shrewd, cold eyes wandered ever and anon from the print to fix itself upon her, as though—which was indeed the fact—he were puzzled in what category to place her. It was obvious to Sir Edward Cheveral, who, though impoverished, was himself a gentleman of the first water, that the ambulent nymph in front of him was not of his class, perfect as was the fit of her grey riding coat, refined and reposeful as were the hands in their long grey gloves, tasteful in its coquettishness as was the grey riding toque, set on chestnut curls, and suitably as these curling tresses, unpowdered, were smoothed away to be tied with a wide black ribbon at the back of the long proud throat.
In the first instance, no young person of family with such claims to distinction as her elaborate travelling gear pointed to, would be voyaging in the public coach unattended; in the second, in her quiet ease, and the full yet not immodest assurance of her glance, the manners of one accustomed to fight the world for herself were very obvious; in the third, there was an indefinable lack of the never-to-be-mistaken stamp of breeding.