Frank, who had a tender heart for all misfortune, surveyed the old lady wistfully. How placid she looked, how at home with her thoughts! It was peacefulness to the spirit to meet her eye. Bowing again, he turned towards Hermione and remarked:
"What a very lovely face! She looks as if she had never known anything but the pleasures of life."
"On the contrary," returned Hermione, "she has never known much but its disappointments. But they have left no trace on her face, or in her nature, I think. She is an embodiment of trust, and in the great silence there is about her, she hears sounds and sees visions which are denied to others. But when did you come to Marston?"
He told her he had just arrived, and, satisfied with the slight look of confusion which mantled her face at this acknowledgment, launched into talk all tending to one end, his love for her. But he did not reach that end immediately; for if the old lady could not hear, she could see, and Frank, for all his impetuosity, possessed sufficient restraint upon himself not to subject himself or Hermione to the criticism of even this most benignant relative. Not till Mrs. Lovell left the room, as she did after a while,—being a very wise old lady as well as mild,—did he allow himself to say:
"There can be but one reason now for my coming to Marston—to see you, Miss Cavanagh; I have no other business here."
"I thought," she began, with some confusion,—evidently she had been taken by surprise,—"that you were looking for some one, a Harriet Smith, I think, whom you had reason to believe once lived here."
"I did come to Marston originally on that errand, but I have so far failed in finding any trace of her in this place that I begin to think we were mistaken in our inferences that she had ever lived here."
"Yet you had reason for thinking that she did," Hermione went on, with the anxiety of one desirous to put off the declaration she probably saw coming.
"Yes; we had reasons, but they prove to have been unfounded."
"Was—was your motive for finding her an important one?" she asked, with some hesitation, and a look of curiosity in her fine eyes.