“Rachel is not too much for me,” said Fanny, “and she and Grace will entertain Bessie, and take her out. But I will talk to Alick. He spoke of coming to-morrow. And don’t you think I might ask Colonel and Mrs. Hammond to spend a day? They would so like the sea for the children.”
“Certainly.”
“Then perhaps you would write—oh, I forgot,” colouring up, “I never can forget the old days, it seems as if you were on the staff still.”
“I always am on yours, and always hope to be,” he said, smiling, “though I am afraid I can’t write your note to the Hammonds for you.”
“But you won’t go away,” she said. “I know your time will be taken up, and you must not let me or the boys be troublesome; but to have you here makes me so much less lost and lonely. And I shall have such a friend in your Erminia. Is that her name?”
“Ermine, an old Welsh name, the softest I ever heard. Indeed it is dressing time,” added Colonel Keith, and both moved away with the startled precision of members of a punctual military household, still feeling themselves accountable to somebody.
CHAPTER VI. ERMINE’S RESOLUTION
“For as his hand the weather steers,
So thrive I best ‘twixt joys and tears,
And all the year have some green ears.”—H. VAUGHAN.
Alison had not been wrong in her presentiment that the second interview would be more trying than the first. The exceeding brightness and animation of Ermine’s countenance, her speaking eyes, unchanged complexion, and lively manner—above all, the restoration of her real substantial self—had so sufficed and engrossed Colin Keith in the gladness of their first meeting that he had failed to comprehend her helpless state; and already knowing her to be an invalid, not entirely recovered from her accident, he was only agreeably surprised to see the beauty of face he had loved so long, retaining all its vivacity of expression. And when he met Alison the next morning with a cordial brotherly greeting and inquiry for her sister, her “Very well,” and “not at all the worse for the excitement,” were so hearty and ready that he could not have guessed that “well” with Ermine meant something rather relative than positive. Alison brought him a playful message from her, that since he was not going to Belfast, she should meet him with a freer conscience if he would first give her time for Rose’s lessons, and, as he said, he had lived long enough with Messrs. Conrade and Co. to acknowledge the wisdom of the message. But Rose had not long been at leisure to look out for him before he made his appearance, and walked in by right, as one at home; and sitting down in his yesterday’s place, took the little maiden on his knee, and began to talk to her about the lessons he had been told to wait for. What would she have done without them? He knew some people who never could leave the house quiet enough to hear one’s-self speak if they were deprived of lessons. Was that the way with her? Rose laughed like a creature, her aunt said, “to whom the notion of noise at play was something strange and ridiculous; necessity has reduced her to Jacqueline Pascal’s system with her pensionnaires, who were allowed to play one by one without any noise.”