“Don’t, Matilda, pray don’t,” Leila exclaimed in a voice of entreaty; “do you not see how sorry he looks?” then turning with a smile to the poor man, who still remained uncovered before them, “Do put on your hat,” she said; “the sun is hurting your eyes, and you need not be the least sorry for what you have said. I dare say you were told to take care of it; that was just the way Nurse used to watch over every thing in the island, only there we had no gates to lock.”
In a few minutes longer they had reached the lodge, a pretty small thatched house in the cottage style, with a profusion of China roses and honeysuckles on its white walls. Leila instantly thought how delightfully it would have suited Peggy Dobie, but she did not say so. The gates were no longer shut, they stood most invitingly open; a tidy, pleasant-looking young woman seemed to have been watching for them at the door of the cottage.
“Oh, Bill, Bill,” she exclaimed, “you have been long, and to have been away to-day of all days in the year, and a fine lady and gentleman away up the approach in the carriage, and the squire himself, and a kind, civil-spoken gentleman he seems to be.”
But the young people were too impatient to listen to further details; the moment they entered the gates they bounded forward. The windings of the approach, though calculated to show the finest trees on the property, they thought much too long, and by the time they reached the house they were breathless with impatience. Mr. Howard, who had been watching them from the window, was at the door to meet them. “Welcome to all of you,” he said, and he stooped down and kissed Leila repeatedly; “welcome to your future home, my Leila; may it be a happy home to you, my dearest child.”
Leila seemed at first quite bewildered; the entrance hall seemed to be so large, the drawing-room larger still. The windows of the drawing-room opened on a trellised balcony, festooned with creeping plants, and filled with rare and beautiful flowers; a broad flight of steps, with stone balustrades on each side, and large vases, scarlet pomegranate and pink oleander in full bloom, led from this balcony to the terrace below; and beyond this terrace the velvet turf, interspersed with beds of gay and fragrant flowers, sloped down to the edge of the broad river, on which many little boats were gliding up and down; happily no steamboat being in sight on this first-favoured moment.
All were loud in their expressions of admiration; they had never seen any thing more beautiful; but though Leila admired, she seemed still bewildered, and almost more oppressed than pleased.
“It is very beautiful; but how shall I ever be able to manage such a house as this?”
Selina whispered, “Don’t distress yourself, Leila, it is not till you are grown up that you will have to manage; your papa will do it now, and my mamma will help him.”
Leila brightened a little, but still looked anxiously around the room: “Surely it is very large,” she said.
It was Matilda’s observation, “Young mistress of Woodlands,” that had done all this; poor Leila was weighed down to the ground with a sudden sense of her responsibilities; to common observers she was a simple child, young, even for her years; but there was often a deep under-current of thought about her, to be discovered only in the changes of her expressive countenance, and in the hesitating, varied tones of her voice.