“I hope so; soon you will not find it so dull.”
“Nay, it is not now so dull. Have I not the happiness of your sympathy? Could I be dull to-day?” said Alvar, with his winning grace.
Virginia blushed, and her great eyes drooped, unready with a reply.
“And there is your cousin,” she said, shyly; “he is a companion; don’t you think him like Cheriton?”
“Yes, a little; but Cheriton is like an angel, though he will not have me say so; but Rupert, he has the devil in his face. But I like him—he is a nice fellow—very nice,” said Alvar, the bit of English idiom sounding oddly in his foreign tones.
Virginia laughed, spite of herself.
“Ah, I make you laugh,” said Alvar. “I wish I had attended more to my English lessons; but there was a time when it was not my intention to come to England, and I did not study. I am not like Cheriton and Jack, I do not love to study. It is very pleasant to smoke, and to do nothing; but I see it is not the custom here, and it is better, I think, to be like my brother.”
“Some people are rather fond of smoking and doing nothing even in England.”
“It is a different sort of doing nothing. I hear my father or Cheriton rebuke Bob for doing nothing; but then he is out of doors with some little animal in a bag—his ferret, I think it is called—to catch the rats; or he runs and gets hot; that is what he calls doing nothing.”
There was a sort of bonhommie in Alvar’s way of describing himself and his surroundings, and a charm in his manner which, added to a pair of eyes full of fire and expression, and a great deal of implied admiration for herself, produced no small effect on Virginia.