“Fiddle-dee-dee. I tell you he is in love with her, over head and ears. He is wonderfully inflammable for a woman-hater. Ask Mr. Severne: he knows.”
“Mr. Severne, is my brother in love with that lady?”
Severne's turn had come; that able young man saw his chance, and did as good a bit of acting as ever was extemporized even by an Italian mime.
“Miss Vizard,” said he, fixing his hazel eyes on her for the first time, in a way that made her feel his power, “what passed in confidence between two friends ought to be sacred. Don't—you—think so?” (The girl quivered, remembering the secret he had confessed to her.) “Miss Maitland has done your brother and me the honor to listen to our secrets. She shall repeat them, if she thinks it delicate; but I shall not, without Vizard's consent; and, more than that, the conversation seems to me to be taking the turn of casting blame and ridicule and I don't know what on the best-hearted, kindest-hearted, truest-hearted, noblest, and manliest man I know. I decline to take any further share in it.”
With these last words in his mouth, he stuck his hands defiantly into his pockets and stalked out into the veranda, looking every inch a man.
Zoe folded her arms and gazed after him with undisguised admiration. How well everything he did became him; his firing up—his brusquerie—the very movements of his body, all so piquant, charming, and unwomanly! As he vanished from her admiring eyes, she turned, with flaming cheeks, on Miss Maitland, and said, “Well, aunt, you have driven them both out at the window; now, say something pretty to Fanny and me, and drive us out at the door.”
Miss Maitland hung her head; she saw she had them all against her but Fanny, and Fanny was a trimmer. She said, sorrowfully, “No, Zoe. I feel how unattractive I have made the room. I have driven away the gods of your idolatry—they are only idols of clay; but that you can't believe. I will banish nobody else, except a cross-grained, but respectable old woman, who is too experienced, and too much soured by it, to please young people when things are going wrong.”
With this she took her bed-candle, and retired.
Zoe had an inward struggle. As Miss Maitland opened her bedroom door, she called to her: “Aunt! one word. Was it you that ordered the fire in my bedroom?”
Now, if she had received the answer she expected, she meant to say, “Then please let me forget everything else you have said or done to-day.” But Miss Maitland stared a little, and said, “Fire in your bedroom? no.”