“Eighteen!” reiterated he, solemnly.
“How few!” remarked Lady Eleanor, almost scornfully.
“You should say, how costly, Mamma!” exclaimed Helen. “These gentlemen are as precious from their price as their rarity!”
“That is scarcely fair, Miss Darcy,” said Forester, at once recalled to himself by the tone of mockery she spoke in; “many adopted the views of Government, after duly weighing every consideration of the measure: some, to my own knowledge, resisted offers of great personal advantage, and Lord Castlereagh was not aware of their adhesion—”
“Till he had them en poche, I suppose,” said Helen, sarcastically; “just as you have been pleased to do with my ball of yellow worsted, and for which I shall be thankful if you will restore it to me.”
Forester blushed deeply, as he drew from his coat-pocket the worsted, which in a moment of abstraction he had lifted from the ground, and thrust into his pocket, without knowing.
Had any moderately shrewd observer witnessed his confusion, and her enjoyment of it, he would easily have understood the precise relation of the two parties to each other. Forester's absence of mind betrayed his engaged affection as palpably as Helen's laughter did her own indifference.
Lady Eleanor did not remark either; her thoughts still rested on the topic of which they had spoken, for it was a subject of no inconsiderable difficulty to her. Whatever her sense of indignant contempt for the bribed adherents of the Ministry, her convictions always inclined to these measures, whose origin was from her native country; her predilections were strongly English; not only her happiest days had been passed there, but she was constantly contrasting the position they would have occupied and sustained in that favored land, against the wasteful and purposeless extravagance of their life in Ireland.
Was it too late to amend? was the question ever rising to her mind, now if even yet the Knight should be induced to adopt the more ambitious course? Every accidental circumstance seemed favorable to the notion: the Government craving his support; her own relatives, influential as they were from rank and station, soliciting it; the Prince himself according favors which could no more be rejected than acknowledged ungraciously.
“What a career for Lionel! What a future for Helen!” such were reflections that would press themselves upon her, but to whose disentanglement her mind suggested no remedy.