"I don't believe she will have me," said Guy, with the air of having hit upon a happy solution of the difficulty. "You will not blame me, uncle, if she refuses me?"
"Yes, I shall," returned old Stephen, grimly. "If she refuses, it will be because you have wooed her in a sorry fashion. You ask her properly, and tell her that I wish it, and she will have you fast enough."
Guy devoutly hoped that his uncle might be mistaken in this belief. But he lacked the courage to withstand him, and boldly claim his right to act as he would in a matter that so closely concerned his happiness. Guy believed that Hilda Bland was the girl who could make him happy; but he was not one to deem the world well lost for love. The heirship of Wyndham was dear to him. Not for any girl's sake could he bear to be disinherited. So he temporized, and drifted into a sort of tacit promise that he would seek to win Aldyth for his wife.
It was with poor spirits that Guy set himself to carry out his purpose. He had little hope that Aldyth would really refuse his brilliant offer. A woman, he told himself in his youthful wisdom, regards marriage from a very different point of view from that of a man. Was it likely that one whose matrimonial chances were so limited and uncertain would reject, in one breath, himself and Wyndham?
But somehow Guy was not very successful in his efforts to act the part of a lover. He found it impossible to convince Aldyth of his sincerity. She would take purely as a joke his pretty speeches and the devoted airs he tried to assume. She laughed at him, and bantered him on what she believed to be mere affectations. The chief result of his endeavours was to raise doubt and jealousy in the mind of Hilda Bland, towards whom his friendliness was marked by strange fluctuations, and who was quick to perceive that Guy was more attentive to his cousin than he had formerly been. One day he would treat Hilda with such apparent indifference that her thoughts would turn with sympathy to Mariana in "The Moated Grange," and she would dream of dying early of a broken heart; then again he suffered himself to be betrayed into the old tenderness of voice and look, and Hilda's heart would beat with tumultuous delight, and life seemed to stretch before her again as a long, bright vista.
Meanwhile, poor Hilda grew daily more dreamy, and unpractical, more neglectful of home duties, more oblivious of all that lay outside the rosy curtains which screened her own inner world of self-conscious emotion. Even Aldyth felt impelled to take her to task sometimes.
"You are getting lazy, Hilda," she exclaimed one day when she was at Mrs. Bland's, and heard Hilda refuse to carry a soup ticket to a poor woman whom Mrs. Bland was desirous of helping.
Kitty, who was present, had at once volunteered to do the errand, and was now buttoning her boots by the fire.
"Oh, it is really too cold to go out this morning," said Hilda, lounging in her easy-chair by the fire, with her pretty little feet on the fender. "Kitty does not mind the cold, but I hate to go out before I have had time to get thoroughly warm."
"There is one kind of poetry Hilda does not appreciate," remarked Kitty—"the poetry of motion."