“But I will call myself, with Miss Digby.”
“No,” said Harley, gravely, but in a whisper. “No; I would rather not. I will explain later.”
“Then,” said the countess aloud, after a glance of surprise at her son, “I must insist on your performing this visit, my dear madam, and you, Signorina. In truth, I have something to say confidentially to—”
“To me,” interrupted Riccabocca. “Ah, Madame la Comtesse, you restore me to five-and-twenty. Go, quick, O jealous and injured wife; go, both of you, quick; and you, too, Harley.”
“Nay,” said Lady Lansmere, in the same tone, “Harley must stay, for my design is not at present upon destroying your matrimonial happiness, whatever it may be later. It is a design so innocent that my son will be a partner in it.”
Here the countess put her lips to Harley’s ear, and whispered. He received her communication in attentive silence; but when she had done, pressed her hand, and bowed his head, as if in assent to a proposal.
In a few minutes the three ladies and Leonard were on their road to the neighbouring cottage.
Violante, with her usual delicate intuition, thought that Leonard and Helen must have much to say to each other; and (ignorant, as Leonard himself was, of Helen’s engagement to Harley) began already, in the romance natural to her age, to predict for them happy and united days in the future. So she took her stepmother’s arm, and left Helen and Leonard to follow.
“I wonder,” she said musingly, “how Miss Digby became Lord L’Estrange’s ward. I hope she is not very rich, nor very high-born.”
“La, my love,” said the good Jemima, “that is not like you; you are not envious of her, poor girl?”