"Oh, I see. For the moment I thought you meant that—that something was already settled."
"No," said Mrs. Murchison; "the dear child is not so easy to please. Half London has been at her feet. But dear Lily has nothing to say to them. She sends them empty away, like the Magnificat."
Mrs. Murchison sighed.
"You are not a mother, Lord Evelyn," she went on, "and you cannot know all that is in a mother's heart, though I am sure you are delightfully sympathetic and understanding. I tell you I hardly sleep a wink at night for dreaming of Lily's future. I want her to marry some Englishman, of course. Some nice pleasant man out of the titled classes. She was born to be titled. I often shut my eyes when I look at her, and say to myself, 'Some day my darling will go into dinner before her own mother.' She has had the opportunity many times, and I have wondered lately whether my dearest has not someone in her eye—I should say her heart."
"I wonder," said Toby, with marked indifference.
"So like the Nile," said Mrs. Murchison diplomatically, giving it to be understood that the conversation was still quite general. "But the mysteries of a maiden's heart, Lord Evelyn!" she sighed. "Lily takes after me; as a child, I was so mysterious that nobody thought I should live."
"Miss Murchison is not delicate?" asked Toby.
"Dear me, no! most indelicate. Her health never gave me a moment's anxiety since she left her cradle. But she is very reticent about some things, and very thoughtful. When I was a child I used to fall in love a hundred times a day; it may have been Vanderbilt or a postman, and I used to put down their initials in a little green morocco pocket-book; but I never used to tell anyone about it, just like Lily. But you can see by her forehead how thoughtful she is, like Marie Antoinette. Doesn't Tennyson speak of the 'bar of Marie Antoinette'? She has it most marked above the eyes."
Toby's ignorance of "In Memoriam" was even less profound than Mrs. Murchison's knowledge of it, and he only murmured that he seemed to remember it, which was not true.
"Thoughtful and pensive," said Mrs. Murchison. "Dear child! how she looked forward to coming down here! And so gay at times. And never, Lord Evelyn," said Mrs. Muchison very earnestly, "has she said an unkind word to me."