She had no friends of her own age or sex. Two or three of both had called, on learning of her presence at Heath Hover, but with the best intentions there was nothing about them to appeal to the girl from any point of view. They were just well-meaning, commonplace people of the most ordinary and commonplace type.
To a certain extent—a large extent—her uncle made up for the want of such companionship. He was a companionable man, given intelligent and sympathetic company, and this he found to the full in her. There was hardly a subject under the sun that they did not thresh out together, and grim old haunted Heath Hover seemed to shake its dry bones into new life with the constant stream of talk and laughter which now echoed from its walls.
“Why, you’ve put back the clock a quarter of a century for me, dear,” he declared. “I feel that much younger. Isn’t that something for you to have done?”
And she had agreed, wholesouledly; and yet, there would obtrude that thought, of late, that she was doing nothing with her life.
By this time her uncle had come to regard her with a sort of idolatry. His capacity for affection had become utterly atrophied for want of an object upon which to expend any of it. Such few acquaintances or relatives as he had he cared nothing about. If he had been well off they would have discovered fast enough that they cared about him, he used to tell himself cynically; and who shall say untruly. He had become self-centred, even morose at times—just content to groove on through life to the end; thankful—if he ever thought of being thankful for anything at all—that there was nobody to worry him. He had allowed himself to be worried at times in his life, and looked back to such times with a mental shudder, which was when the spirit of thankfulness was evolved.
But now here was such an object, and it had promptly captured the whole of his capacity for affection and was expanding it every day. There was everything in it that appealed—the sweet, refined beauty of the child, the sunny lightheadedness, the naïve untrammelled appreciation of all that appealed to him—the sheer youthful enjoyment of life—well, he had not lived in vain. And he made an idol of her more and more every day.
So they rambled together, drove long drives together, talked together; indeed, not a wish of hers was left ungratified where it lay within his power to gratify it, and she, knowing the extent of such power, never dreamed of looking beyond it. And the curious part it of was that he, watching her with furtive and solicitous jealousy, found that she was by no means tiring of this mode of life.
Once or twice he had suggested she should ask some girl friend to come and pay her a visit, as a relief from one incessant old fogey, but she had not been in the least responsive. There was no such “relief” required, she had answered spontaneously. She was quite happy as they were. She would like to get Violet Clinock, when the latter could come, but that would not be yet. Meanwhile she was quite jolly as they were.
To Mervyn this reply came with an undashed feeling of relief. Stay—not altogether undashed perhaps, for he was old enough to know that a year or two at the outside in the ordinary course of things would be all that should remain to him of this idyllic time. Why, only to look at the child! Were all the best years of her life to be wasted, mewed up in a lonely old country corner! And with this idea came one that had just hooked itself, not altogether pleasantly, on to his mind—and it spelt Helston Varne.
For the latter had availed himself of his invitation to “come again.” He had “come again,” only to the extent of three times, but Mervyn had not been slow to mark a certain very complete sympathy, as of ideas in common, that had sprung up between him and Melian, and that from the very first. They talked animatedly on every subject, several outside his own sphere of knowledge, and in short, seemed thoroughly to have taken to each other. And Helston Varne was a remarkably fine looking man.