“Good morning! What a lovely day it is!”
“Yes, very lovely—a great change,” he murmured, pressing her hands one instant; then dropping them with a gentle sigh.
“Yesterday was so gloomy,” she said; “but this——”
She broke off with a faint laugh, for the sky was, in fact, clouded; and she remembered the floods of silvery light that had come through the windows the day before, mocking her anxiety, and turning her heart sick with a thought of the dear ones at home.
Harold looked at her a moment in a grave, questioning way. He had seen the young clerk address her, and gave the smile on her lip, and the glow in her cheek, an interpretation that made his own greeting constrained and formal. Eva did not heed this either, the warmth at her heart was not to be chilled by a cold glance just then, even from the man who had been kindest to her. She went to a mirror, in which customers were expected to admire themselves, and stood before it smoothing her hair, graceful as a bird, and quite as unconscious of her own beauty.
Just then a party came into the show-room, and Harold turned his attention on them, while Eva stole away from the mirror, and stood ready to be called, without one trace of the shrinking pride which had made her so sensitive the day before.
The lady, who soon required her attention, was a stout, full-featured dame, arrayed in costly silk, flounced, looped, and puffed, until the rich material was lost in a confusion of trimmings, which fluttered, like the plumage of an angry bird, as she walked.
Up and down the vast show-room this person wandered, touching first one article, then another, with a heavy hand, so tightly incased in canary kid gloves, that the delicate fabric seemed ready to burst at each incautious movement of the imprisoned fingers. Now and then she would toss the fabric aside with a scornful little sniff, and ask the obsequious clerk if he had nothing better than that to show a lady who did not stand on prices, but must have the best of everything when she went a shopping. What would she please to look at, indeed? Why just what happened to take her fancy; as for wanting anything particular, she was a long way beyond that. If the young man had anything very rechercher, and out of the common, she didn’t mind looking at it; but, goodness gracious! “Who was that young woman?”
Here the new customer lifted both hands, and parted her lips with an expression of growing amazement, while her eyes, deepening from blue to pale gray, were fastened on Eva Laurence.
“That young lady,” answered the clerk, “is Miss Laurence, just engaged. You are not the first person who has been struck with her good looks. Haven’t a more genteel girl in the establishment.”