“You may tell Janet,” said Alice, vigorously, her face glowing, “that if we—you and I—were condemned to live forever on a desert isl—No; I will write to her. That will be the best way. Good-morning.”
Parker, hitherto imperturbable, now showed signs of alarm. “I beg, Alice,” he said, “that you will say nothing unfair to her of me. You cannot with truth say anything bad of me.”
“Do you really care for Janet?” said Alice, wavering.
“Of course,” he replied, indignantly. “Janet is a very superior girl.”
“I have always said so,” said Alice, rather angry because some one else had forestalled her with the meritorious admission. “I will tell her the simple truth—that there has never been anything between us except what is between all cousins; and that there never could have been anything more on my part. I must go now. I don’t know what that man must think of me already.”
“I should be sorry to lower you in his esteem,” said Parker, maliciously. “Good-bye, Alice.” Uttering the last words in a careless tone, he again pulled up the white horse’s head, raised his hat, and sped away. It was not true that he was in the habit of riding in the park every season. He had learned from Janet that Alice was accustomed to ride there in the forenoon; and he had hired the white horse in order to meet her on equal terms, feeling that a gentleman on horseback in the road by the Serpentine could be at no social disadvantage with any lady, however exalted her associates.
As for Alice, she went home with his reminder that Miss Carew was her patron rankling in her. The necessity for securing an independent position seemed to press imminently upon her. And as the sole way of achieving this was by marriage, she felt for the time willing to marry any man, without regard to his person, age, or disposition, if only he could give her a place equal to that of Miss Carew in the world, of which she had lately acquired the manners and customs.
CHAPTER XII
When the autumn set in, Alice was in Scotland learning to shoot; and Lydia was at Wiltstoken, preparing her father’s letters and memoirs for publication. She did not write at the castle, all the rooms in which were either domed, vaulted, gilded, galleried, three-sided, six-sided, anything except four-sided, or in some way suggestive of the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments,” and out of keeping with the associations of her father’s life. In her search for a congruous room to work in, the idea of causing a pavilion to be erected in the elm vista occurred to her. But she had no mind to be disturbed just then by the presence of a troop of stone-masons, slaters, and carpenters, nor any time to lose in waiting for the end of their operations. So she had the Warren Lodge cleansed and lime washed, and the kitchen transformed into a comfortable library, where, as she sat facing the door at her writing-table, in the centre of the room, she could see the elm vista through one window and through another a tract of wood and meadow land intersected by the high-road and by a canal, beyond which the prospect ended in a distant green slope used as a sheep run. The other apartments were used by a couple of maid-servants, who kept the place well swept and dusted, prepared Miss Carew’s lunch, answered her bell, and went on her errands to the castle; and, failing any of these employments, sat outside in the sun, reading novels. When Lydia had worked in this retreat daily for two months her mind became so full of the old life with her father that the interruptions of the servants often recalled her to the present with a shock. On the twelfth of August she was bewildered for a moment when Phoebe, one of the maids, entered and said,