Lily thought a good deal about her friendship with Nicholas Aubray.
Sometimes she rejoiced almost incredulously in his flashes of sympathetic understanding, and in the frank enjoyment of child-like things that he, unlike her, never thought it necessary to conceal. Sometimes she applied to herself the old term of "disloyal," because an involuntary criticism of his simple vanity, or of his curiously unequal powers of judgment, occasionally flashed across her.
She was flattered and touched by his enthusiastic liking for herself, and presently she began to wonder, rather awestruck, whether he could have fallen in love with her.
When she suddenly found him looking at her in silence with eager, pleading eyes, or when he said: "We'll let the others go on a bit, let's walk slowly," she was reminded of the boy Colin Eastwood, and she then thought that perhaps Nicholas Aubray loved her. When Aunt Clo said, in her thoughtful, appraising way: "My very good friend, Nicholas, is accounted an able man in his own line. He has made a success of his career—oh, undoubtedly!" then Lily felt that only an incredible presumption could ever have led her to imagine that so clever a man and one so much her senior, could ever have thought of her save with the most passing, friendly interest.
His susceptibility to beauty was very evident, and he made it clear that he admired Lily's.
That, of course, was not at all the same thing as falling in love, Lily told herself.
She speculated a great deal more upon the state of Nicholas Aubray's feelings, than upon her own. One of the more solemn counsels which Lily had received from Miss Melody upon leaving Bridgecrap, had concerned the question of falling in love.
"Not too many romantic fancies in that little head, childie," had been Miss Melody's warning. "Remember that you've no mother to guide you, poor child, and keep a watch upon yourself. Not too much novel-reading—aha, Lily, isn't that a weakness?—and no day-dreaming, mind."
Lily had been quite as much annoyed at hearing herself called romantic as the romantic usually are.
"If love should come—as I hope it will, in due course—let it all come quite naturally. Don't think about it beforehand; don't indulge in fancies. Beware of that romantic imagination," Miss Melody had repeated with great significance.