“I am sure of it!” cried she. “It is the testimony of a sorrow-stricken heart to an old friend's memory; but I hear my brother's voice; let me go and tell him you are here.” But Barrington was already coming towards them.
“Ah, Mr. Conyers!” cried he. “If you knew how I have longed for this moment! I believe you are the only man in the world I ever ill treated on my own threshold; but the very thought of it gave me a fit of illness, and now the best thing I know on my recovery is, that I am here to ask your pardon.”
“I have really nothing to forgive. I met under your roof with a kindness that never befell me before; nor do I know the spot on earth where I could look for the like to-morrow.”
“Come back to it, then, and see if the charm should not be there still.”
“Where 's Josephine, brother?” asked Miss Barrington, who, seeing the young man's agitation, wished to change the theme.
“She's gone to put some ferns in water; but here she comes now.”
Bounding wildly along, like a child in joyous freedom, Josephine came towards them, and, suddenly halting at sight of a stranger, she stopped and courtesied deeply, while Conyers, half ashamed at his own unhappy blunder about her, blushed deeply as he saluted her. Indeed, their meeting was more like that of two awkward timid children than of two young persons of their age; and they eyed each other with the distrust school boys and girls exchange on a first acquaintance.
“Brother, I have something to tell you,” said Miss Barrington, who was eager to communicate the news she had just heard of General Conyers; and while she drew him to one side, the young people still stood there, each seeming to expect the other would make some advance towards acquaintanceship. Conyers tried to say some commonplace,—some one of the fifty things that would have occurred so naturally in presence of a young lady to whom he had been just presented; but he could think of none, or else those that he thought of seemed inappropriate. How talk, for instance, of the world and its pleasures to one who had been estranged from it! While he thus struggled and contended with himself, she suddenly started as if with a flash of memory, and said, “How forgetful!”
“Forgetful!—and of what?” asked he.
“I have left the book I was reading to grandpapa on the rock where we were sitting. I must go and fetch it.”