Along this road were the prettiest residences, the gayest little conservatories, the most flowery lilacs, laburnums, and acacias of suburban Oxley. Here was the “best neighbourhood,” and here, on the clean, gravelled footway, the nursery-maids and children went to walk on fine mornings; ladies and little dogs paid calls of an afternoon; and groups of slim, long-haired girls came out to attend classes at Oxley Manor, the famous Young Ladies’ School. The Manor House lay back from the road behind high, substantial, red-brick walls, with mossy crevices, and bushy ivy peeping over the top; showing beyond, garden trees, walnuts, acacias, and horse-chestnuts, surrounding the big, substantial house, where, from the small-paned windows, peeped now and then a girl’s face.
There was no better school in the country than the Miss Vennings’ at Oxley Manor; and it was considered a great privilege for the girls of Oxley that certain classes there were opened to them; and a still greater that Miss Spencer and Miss Crofton were allowed to attend regularly as day scholars. But these young ladies did not come from Redhurst by the road. There was a pretty, quiet path through the meadows—half-way between the public road and the towing-path by the canal—that led here through a bit of copsewood famous for primroses, there across a sunny, open meadow; now over a low, wooden stile, then between high hedges, full of brambles, honey-suckles, and roses; till the hedges grew neater and closer, and terminated in the high red wall of the Manor kitchen-garden, from which opened a little green gate. On the other side of the road was a paddock, with a shallow pond where ducks flourished, and where, on the opposite bank, an old pollard willow threw its slender branches across the muddy water.
On that sunny afternoon a sunnier spot could hardly have been found than the narrow path under the wall; and yet here lingered two figures: a girl, who had poised herself on the end of a great garden-roller, and a young man who leaned against the white railing of the pond beside her. She was a graceful little lady, small and soft-faced; with brown hair, shining and neat, round rosy lips, and clear, steady eyes of a hazel tint. Her white dress was elaborately trimmed with handsome embroidery, and all her blue ribbons were fresh and smart, as if they had no need to see sunny days enough to dim their brightness. There was a bag of books at her feet, and her pretty eyes were cast down towards them; and her pink cheeks were flushed with considerable, yet not excessive, embarrassment.
“But, Arthur,” she said, with a clear, distinct, and yet soft utterance, “but, Arthur, I think we ought to consider about it a great deal.”
“I have never considered it at all,” said Arthur Spencer.
He was a tall young man, slight and graceful; with—spite of his second class and his cultivated expression—a sort of happy-go-lucky air, that seemed hardly to have outgrown the right to his old appellation of a “very pretty boy,” earned by his bright colour, dark hair, with a picturesque wave in it, and black-lashed eyes, of that distinct shade of grey which cannot be mistaken for blue or hazel. He was an elegant, rather handsome young man at three-and-twenty, with a light-hearted, self-reliant manner that might have been careless and even conceited had a less earnest and genuine affection looked out from his bright eyes at the pretty creature beside him. Arthur thought himself clever, good-looking, rather a fine fellow in his way; but what did he not think of Mysie Crofton?
“There’s nothing new in it; is there, Mysie?” he continued, as he took her prettily-gloved hand, with the freedom of old intercourse, just touched with something sweeter. “Nothing new. We were always the friends of the family, and it must have come to this soon.”
“Yes,” said Mysie, simply; “but I thought—I thought—those things never did come to anything.”
“You thought? Ah, Mysie, I have my answer now: You thought, you little worldly-minded thing, that first love was all humbug, eh? Well, we’ll be an instance to the contrary.”
Mysie blushed.