“Ah, George gave it to her; I forgot that,” said Travers, laughing pleasantly.
It was some minutes before Miss Travers returned with the Skye terrier, and she seemed to have recovered her spirits in regaining that ornamental accession to the party; talking very quickly and gayly, and with flushed cheeks, like a young person excited by her own overflow of mirth.
But when, half an hour afterwards, Kenelm took leave of her and Mrs. Campion at the hall-door, the flush was gone, her lips were tightly compressed, and her parting words were not audible. Then, as his figure (side by side with her father, who accompanied his guest to the lodge) swiftly passed across the lawn and vanished amid the trees beyond, Mrs. Campion wound a mother-like arm around her waist and kissed her. Cecilia shivered and turned her face to her friend smiling; but such a smile,—one of those smiles that seem brimful of tears.
“Thank you, dear,” she said meekly; and, gliding away towards the flower-garden, lingered a while by the gate which Kenelm had opened the night before. Then she went with languid steps up the green slopes towards the ruined priory.
BOOK IV.
CHAPTER I.
IT is somewhat more than a year and a half since Kenelm Chillingly left England, and the scene now is in London, during that earlier and more sociable season which precedes the Easter holidays,—season in which the charm of intellectual companionship is not yet withered away in the heated atmosphere of crowded rooms,—season in which parties are small, and conversation extends beyond the interchange of commonplace with one’s next neighbour at a dinner-table,—season in which you have a fair chance of finding your warmest friends not absorbed by the superior claims of their chilliest acquaintances.
There was what is called a conversazione at the house of one of those Whig noblemen who yet retain the graceful art of bringing agreeable people together, and collecting round them the true aristocracy, which combines letters and art and science with hereditary rank and political distinction,—that art which was the happy secret of the Lansdownes and Hollands of the last generation. Lord Beaumanoir was himself a genial, well-read man, a good judge of art, and a pleasant talker. He had a charming wife, devoted to him and to her children, but with enough love of general approbation to make herself as popular in the fashionable world as if she sought in its gayeties a refuge from the dulness of domestic life.