‘Laura is exactly like Apollo playing the lyre, outside mamma’s old manuscript book of music.’
‘Has not Amy made beautiful wreaths?’ said Laura. ‘She stripped the tree, and Guy had to fetch the ladder, to gather the sprays on the top of the wall.’
‘Do you see your bit of myrtle, Guy,’ said Amy, pointing to it, on Laura’s head, ‘that you tried to persuade me would pass for jessamine?’
‘Ah! it should have been all myrtle,’ said Guy.
Philip leant meantime against the door. Laura only once glanced towards him, thinking all this too trifling for him, and never imagining the intense interest with which he gave a meaning to each word and look.
‘Well done, Mary!’ cried Charles, ‘they have furbished you up handsomely.’
Mary made a face, and said she should wonder who was the fashionable young lady she should meet in the pier-glasses at Allonby. Then Mr. Edmonstone hurried them away, and they arrived in due time.
The saloon at Allonby was a beautiful room, one end opening into a conservatory, full of coloured lamps, fresh green leaves, and hot-house plants. There they found as yet only the home party, the good-natured, merry Lord Kilcoran, his quiet English wife, who had bad health, and looked hardly equal to the confusion of the evening; Maurice, and two younger boys; Eveleen, and her two little sisters, Mabel and Helen.
‘This makes it hard on Charlotte,’ thought Amy, while the two girls dragged her off to show her the lamps in the conservatory; and the rest attacked Mrs. Edmonstone for not having brought Charlotte, reproaching her with hardness of heart of which they had never believed her capable—Lady Eveleen, in especial, talking with that exaggeration of her ordinary manner which her dread of Captain Morville made her assume. Little he recked of her; he was absorbed in observing how far Laura’s conduct coincided with Charles’s hints. On the first opportunity, he asked her to dance, and was satisfied with her pleased acquiescence; but the next moment Guy came up, and in an eager manner made the same request.
‘I am engaged,’ said she, with a bright, proud glance at Philip; and Guy pursued Amabel into the conservatory, where he met with better success. Mr. Edmonstone gallantly asked Mary if he was too old a partner, and was soon dancing with the step and spring that had once made him the best dancer in the county.