“You will do as you please, of course,” said Helen, coldly, but secretly not ill pleased. “But it will look very strange.”
“I can’t help it. You can tell them all how it was;” and Fayette ran up stairs to pack up her things.
She had hardly done so when Carlos came back. “I wish you joy of your companion,” said Helen to her cousin, with something very like a sneer.
“I might easily have a worse one,” said Fayette, who liked the big, simple young fellow. “One of us is enough to go, and it may as well be I as you. I hope you’ll enjoy the evening. Remember me to Miss Fenton and the others.”
It was with a little pang that Fayette spoke. She had been quite as much interested in the lectures as her cousin, and she had found herself very much at home with the Misses Fenton, the granddaughters of Mrs. Lyndon, at the Hickories.
“Well, of course one is enough, and more than enough,” said Helen; “but I suppose now you have alarmed yourself so, you will not be satisfied to stay here. I shall come home with Mr. Allison Sunday. Good-bye.”
Helen went back to the house, and laid out her dress for the evening.
The party from the Hickories, and the stray professor, who had given four lectures on geology in Valery’s Corners, were coming to tea at the Parsonage.
Helen had met the professor before, and had been complimented on the interest she displayed in science, and she felt, as she said, that she could not be satisfied without putting down the notes of the last lecture.
Helen was an intellectual girl—so said her teachers, and so she believed. She liked to acquire facts, and rules, and classifications, and dates, and range them all nicely away in her mind, as she put her cuffs, and collars, and laces, and ribbons in her boxes; as she saved odds and ends of silk and linen, and put them into labeled bags.