“How dreadfully they looked! Do you think it was wrong of me?” she half whispered to her partner.
“Oh, dear, no! Sensible and plucky, and everything delightful! You are much too charming to be bound down to silly conventionalities. Come, let us have this dance. I'm sure you are engaged to some one in the supper room who can't deserve such a delightful partner. Let us have this TROIS TEMPS, and hurl defiance at the Greyshot chaperons.”
Rose laughed, and allowed herself to be borne off. She had been excited before, now she was doubly excited, and Captain Golightly had the most delicious step imaginable.
CHAPTER X. Hard at Work
Longing is God's fresh heavenward will
With our poor earthward striving;
We quench it that we may be still
Content with merely living;
But, would we learn that heart's full scope
Which we are hourly wronging,
Our lives must climb from hope to hope
And realize our longing. J. R. Lowell
Perhaps it was only natural that there should be that winter a good deal of communication between the secularist's house in Guilford Terrace and the clergyman's house in Guilford Square.
From the first Raeburn had taken a great fancy to Charles Osmond, and now that Brian had become so closely connected with the memory of their sudden bereavement, and had made himself almost one of them by his silent, unobtrusive sympathy, and by his numberless acts of delicate considerateness, a tie was necessarily formed which promised to deepen into one of those close friendships that sometimes exist between two entire families.
It was a bleak, chilly afternoon in March, when Charles Osmond, returning from a long round of parish work, thought he would look in for a few minutes at the Raeburns'; he had a proposal to make to Erica, some fresh work which he thought might interest her. He rang the bell at the now familiar door and was admitted; it carried him back to the day when he had first called there and had been shown into the fire-lit room, with the book-lined walls, and the pretty little girl curled up on the rug, with her cat and her toasting fork. Time had brought many changes since then. This evening he was again shown into the study, but this time the gas was lighted, and there was no little girl upon the hearth rug. Erica was sitting at her desk hard at work. Her face lighted up at the sight of her visitor.
“Every one is out except me,” she said, more brightly than he had heard her speak since her return. “Did you really come to see me. How good of you.”