"A man with a past like his would reveal a thousand amazing tastes and prejudices and views, the like of which you never heard. You would spend your life in teaching, and combating, and obliterating. And the little six-room frame—seems to me it has a little garden in front, with turfed flower beds, raised in stars, and hearts, and triangles. If cotton doesn't pick up somehow you can't expect much from your father till his death—I hope for your sake, as well as his, that's a long way off. He is a young man, comparatively; he may marry again. I want you to make a comfortable match, and be easy and happy. Ruth's prospects are so good in her engagement to Philip Trumbull—I wish I could make her write more regularly to that man—she is so idle!—and I couldn't bear for you to be less appropriately placed."
"I haven't asked him to marry me, Aunt Dora," Lucia said suddenly in her natural manner, "and I can assure you that he has not made the slightest intimation tending that way."
"Well, so far, so good! Get up off the floor—that stuff pulls so, and just see how your knee is straining it. What a moonlight night!" she exclaimed, rising and standing before the window. "What a mystery on the mountains!"
CHAPTER XVII
The morning broke with abounding good cheer. It was impossible not to respond to the revivifying matutinal influences. The vast solemnity of the austere mountain ranges filling the universe seemed more impersonal. Some stupendous, resplendent work of art might thus affect the senses. Only a keenly receptive temperament, the impressionable, plastic mood, might embrace its insistent meaning, its eloquent message, its redundant appeal to every vibrant, sensitive pulse. One saw the reality, yet put it aside, postponed it, like the great facts of life and death, and the momentousness of eternity, turning instead to the cheerful trifle of the hour. And perhaps it was enough to breathe such fresh balsamic air, to hear the sonorous periods of the lordly wind sounding over cliff and torrent, while all the poly-tinted leafy forests bent in obeisance; to see with the shallow outward eye the variant tints of blue, from the dark blurred efflorescence on the nearest slopes to the translucent sapphire of further ranges and thence to a hard, clear, turquoise blue, and so to a faint, vague azure that one could hardly discriminate from the sky line; and above still, the silent great, white domes, where, although so early, the snow had fallen. Even the shadows were but simulacra of winged joys, as the white dazzling clouds sped through the sky, while their similitudes followed swiftly below over the mountain side and the valley, racing for some unimagined aërial goal. The air was full of woodsy fragrance—the odour of sere leaves, the pungent aroma of mint and of water-side weeds, the balsamic breath of fir and pine. Keen, too, withal; the group gathering around the hearth in the office comprised all the adult guests in the house, save a few loiterers, still lingering at the breakfast tables nearest the fire in the great dining-room. Now and then juvenile parties came thundering down the stairs with golf clubs or tennis rackets, rushed through the office, and were gone, banging the glass doors to imminent fracture, or the hearth-side was recruited by the laggards from the breakfast table bringing a whiff of cold air from the transit through the hall. Ruth and Lucia were rubbing their pink hands, and shivering in their boleros of dark red and light blue cloth respectively, worn over their sheer lawn morning dresses, to the wonderment of Jardine, who could not comprehend why, if they were cold, they should not wear warm cheviot gowns, unmindful of the unwritten law of truly orthodox Southern women, who would fain cling to their white lawn attire till the snow falls. Lloyd's theatric discrimination had already appraised the effect of their Dresden belt ribbons, and high stocks, the one in red and brown, the other blue and pink. He bowed to them with distant gravity, but his face had a suggestion of happiness which had not heretofore characterised its quiet composure. His peculiar appeal to popular favour had been all the more effective because of the romantic history of good fortune detailed in his absence last night, and there had been some very hearty hand-shaking in the casual introductions around the fireside this morning. All the house looked with a joyous prepossession upon the newly found legatee and a sort of vicarious pleasure. They were even prepared to find a certain quaint zest in his "outrageous profession," as one irreconcilable old prig called it.
"Did you have a fine bout with the gloves?" asked a clean-shaven gentleman, taking his cigar from his smiling lips. His expression just now was as benignant as a bishop's, but he was broker at home.
Lloyd was a trifle embarrassed; he did not know how much of the lawn had been in view from his interlocutor's point of observation.
"Oh, Mr. Laniston will get so he can stand up, after a little."
There was a laugh around the circle, and Frank's pink cheeks grew very red.
"Why, Francis," exclaimed his mother in genuine amazement, "I thought you were a champion boxer!"