Mervyn cast a keen glance at her, but she held her pinched little features well together and gave no sign. A very small face she had, with but little expression, and but little was required of it.
“I thought I heard him giving you his autobiography the other evening,” he said with a formal, frosty smile.
“Oh, but we need the estimate of a friend to come at the truest truth,” she opined, sagely.
“I could add nothing to what he has already said,” Mervyn replied succinctly. And Mrs. Annandale felt as if reproved as a gossip, baffled in the hope of slander, and disregarded as a cynic.
She hardly knew where to turn. In desperation she gave up the personal conduct of the action.
“Why do you two young people sit moping in the house this fine day?” she cried. “Arabella, why don’t you ask Captain Mervyn to take you to walk on the ramparts? He will not let the cannon bite you, and the snow is almost gone!”
She glanced at the young officer with her coercive smile, and certainly he could not refuse. He rose instantly—“At your service,” he said, turning with a polite bow to the young lady.
The demonstration certainly had not the eager enthusiastic urgency with which he had offered to show her the fort when she first arrived;—it hardly suggested an appreciation of the prospect of a delightful walk with a charming young lady, nor expressed gratitude for an unexpected pleasure and honor conferred upon him. Mrs. Annandale restrained her sentiments till the two young people were fairly out of the house; then her first sensation was one of rejoicing that the window was so small and the glass so thick that she might unobserved shake her fist at him as he walked away.
“I’d like to gnaw your bones,” she said, unaware how savage she looked. Then she narrowed her eyes intently to mark if Arabella’s pelisse did not hang short in the back, much relieved to perceive a moment later that the suggested calamity was merely the result of her leaning a trifle forward as she ascended the ramp of the barbette to reach the level of the terre-pleine. Mervyn had courteously offered his hand to assist her.
“Throttle him!” muttered the fierce little duenna. But the folds of the pelisse swung back in place as Arabella stood erect on the rampart and looked about her with interest. A violet-hued cloth was the fabric of this garment, and it was trimmed about the edges with a narrow band of swan’s-down. A hood of like material was on her head, and the glitter of her golden hair, rolled high, was framed by white down like some lingering wreath of the snow. It had indeed disappeared; the ramparts were clear; the foot-path hard-trodden; the banquettes beside the parapet, where the soldiers were wont to stand to fire through loop-holes in the stockade, still dripped, having been shaded by the high pointed stakes when the sun shone.