“Oh, no! I have no mother!”
“Forgive me!” said Percival; for the tone of Helen’s voice told him that he had touched the spring of a household sorrow. “And,” he added, with a jealousy that he could scarcely restrain from making itself evident in his accent, “that gentleman who spoke to you under the Colonnade,—I have seen him before, but where I cannot remember. In fact, you have put everything but yourself out of my head. Is he related to you?”
“He is my cousin.”
“Cousin!” repeated Percival, pouting a little; and again there was silence.
“I don’t know how it is,” said Percival at last, and very gravely, as if much perplexed by some abstruse thought, “but I feel as if I had known you all my life. I never felt this for any one before.”
There was something so irresistibly innocent in the boy’s serious, wondering tone as he said these words that a smile, in spite of herself, broke out amongst the thousand dimples round Helen’s charming lips. Perhaps the little witch felt a touch of coquetry for the first time.
Percival, who was looking sidelong into her face, saw the smile, and said, drawing up his head, and shaking back his jetty curls: “I dare say you are laughing at me as a mere boy; but I am older than I look. I am sure I am much older than you are. Let me see, you are seventeen, I suppose?”
Helen, getting more and more at her ease, nodded playful assent.
“And I am not far from twenty-one. Ah, you may well look surprised, but so it is. An hour ago I felt a mere boy; now I shall never feel a boy again!”
Once more there was a long pause, and before it was broken, they had gained the very spot in which Helen had lost her friend.