But Adèle did not seem to join in her mother's mirth. She had dropped her knife and fork in a kind of despair, while a sudden pallor, quickly succeeded by a vivid flush, showed her distress.
"Good gracious, child! what is wrong?" cried her mother.
Her answer was given through a flood of tears: "Oh, mamma! mamma! how could you? And I was so happy, and I thought he liked me a little—only a very little—and that, in spite of everything, it might be all right some day? Now—now—"
The last part of the sentence was lost in the folds of her pocket-handkerchief.
Poor Adèle was rather upset with the events of the morning, following as they did upon the knowledge of what she looked upon as Arthur's desertion; to hear now that even their engagement, in which she had rejoiced as a proof of his real affection for her, as a kind of pledge for his return, was due not to his own unbiassed freedom of choice, but to her mother's machinations,—this was a kind of finishing-stroke to her misfortunes. She continued to sob, somewhat to her mother's annoyance.
"What a perfect baby you are still, Adèle!" she said; "it's well, after all, that I sent James out of the room. Come, dry up your eyes, and tell me what is the meaning of this. To say that anything I told you just now could have caused such an outburst is perfectly absurd. What has Arthur been saying or doing? I shall have to take him in hand."
Adèle lifted up her glistening eyes and carmine cheeks from the grateful shade of her pocket-handkerchief. "You must do nothing of the kind, mamma," she said indignantly—she was quite unlike herself for the moment—"you have done mischief enough already."
"Mischief enough!" Mrs. Churchill's glass paused half-way between the table and her lips; she was absolutely petrified with surprise. Adèle was an only daughter, and something of a spoilt child; but hitherto she had always been gentle and obedient, for she was naturally docile; then she and her mother had such different tastes that their wills very seldom clashed. This vigorous assertion of personality was a new thing, and for the moment clever, good-natured Mrs. Churchill, with all the knowledge of human nature upon which she plumed herself, scarcely knew how to treat it.
"This is what comes of romantic notions," she said severely. "I always thought the poetry-reading bad; if this kind of thing goes on I shall have to put a stop to it altogether. Now-a-days it seems to be the idea for young ladies and gentlemen to fall desperately in love, indulge in pretty poetic love-scenes and do a little wasting away for the benefit of one another. I suppose something of this has got into your silly little head, Adèle. You and Arthur should have been moved spontaneously to fall into one another's arms, like the hero and heroine of a play. Bah, child! there's a behind-the-scenes to life as well as the stage, and lovers are generally only puppets; they act the drama and other people pull the strings. Don't look so very woebegone: I tell you more than half the marriages in the world would never have taken place without some such helping hand as mine. You ought to be grateful instead of indignant."
Adèle had dried her eyes. She was rather ashamed of her outburst; she ought to have known long ago that her mother's matter-of-fact nature and keen common sense would never chime in with her own ultra-refined, high-flown notions of life and action; and hers, after all, were the ideas of a young girl to whom the great world was still a land of visions and dreams; her mother's were those of a woman who knew something of the world, who had passed through very varied experiences, who, with all her good-nature—for Mrs. Churchill was what might have been called a comfortable matron—had grown a little hard and unsympathetic by reason of the rubs and raps she had encountered, making some of her fine gold dim.