Fitzsimmons never urged Lucinda to play, never handed her to the piano, never placed her harp for her, never turned over the leaves of her music book; but she always perceived that though he affected to mingle with the groups that stood round as listeners, he uniformly took a position from whence he could see her to advantage all the time. When she happened to glance towards him, which, it must be confessed, she did much oftener than she intended (particularly when she came to the finest passage of her song), she never failed to find his eyes fixed on her face with a gaze of involuntary admiration, that, when they met, was instantly changed to an averted look of indifference.
Though he was scrupulous in dancing with her once only in the course of the evening, she could not but perceive that, during this set, his countenance, in spite of himself, lighted up with even more than its usual animation. And if she accidentally turned her head, she saw that his eyes were following her every motion: as well indeed they might, for she danced with the lightness of a sylph, and the elegance of a lady.
Notwithstanding his own acknowledged taste for everything connected with the fine arts, Fitzsimmons never asked to see Miss Mandeville's drawings. But she observed that after she had been showing them to others, and he supposed her attention to be elsewhere engaged, he failed not to take them up, and gaze on them as if he found it difficult to lay them down again.
In conversation, he never risked a compliment to Miss Mandeville, but often dissented with her opinion, and frequently rallied her.—Yet when she was talking to any one else, he always contrived to be within hearing; and frequently, when engaged himself in conversing with others, he involuntarily stopped short to listen to what Lucinda was saying.
Miss Mandeville had read much, and seen much, and had had much love made to her: but her heart had never, till now, been touched even slightly. That Fitzsimmons admired her, she could not possibly doubt: and that he loved her, she would have been equally certain, only that he continued all the time in excellent health and spirits; that, so far from sitting "like patience on a monument," he seldom sat anywhere; that when he smiled (which he did very often) it was evidently not at grief; and that the concealment he affected, was assuredly not feeding on his cheek, which, so far from turning "green and yellow," had lost nothing of its "natural ruby."
Neither was our heroine at all likely to die for love. Though there seemed no prospect of his coming to a proposal, and though she was sometimes assured by the youngest and prettiest of her female friends, that they knew from authentic sources that Mr. Fitzsimmons had magnanimously declared against marrying a woman of fortune; yet other ladies, who were neither young nor handsome, and had no hope of Mr. Fitzsimmons for themselves, were so kind as to convince Miss Mandeville that he admired her even at "the very top of admiration." And these generous and disinterested ladies were usually, after such agreeable communications, invited by Miss Mandeville to pass the evening with her.
Also—our heroine chanced one day to overhear a conversation between Dora, her own maid, and another mulatto girl; in which Dora averred to her companion that she had heard from no less authority than Squire Fitzsimmons's man Cato, "who always wore a blue coat, be the colour what it may, that the squire was dead in love with Miss Lucinda, as might be seen from many invisible symptoms, and that both Dora and Cato had a certain foregiving that it would turn out a match at last, for all that the lady had the money on her side, which, to be sure, was rather unnatural; and that the wedding might be looked for momently, any minute."
In the course of the next quarter of an hour, Miss Lucinda called Dora into her dressing-room, and presented her with a little Thibet shawl, which she had worn but once. Dora grinned understandingly: and from that time she contrived to be overheard so frequently in similar conversations, that much of the effect was diminished.
To resume the thread of our narrative—Lucinda being one morning on a visit to her friend Miss Delwin, the latter adverted to the failure of the annual dancing party.
"What would the beaux say," exclaimed Lucinda, struck with a sudden idea, "if the belles were to give a ball to them, by way of hinting our sense of their extraordinary remissness? Let us convince them that, according to the luminous and incontrovertible aphorism of the renowned Sam Patch, 'some things may be done as well as others.'"