“Well?” suggested Aimée.
“He is as handsome and—as tall, and he dresses as well.”
“Do you like him as well?” said Aimée.
“Ye-es—no. I have not known him long enough to tell you.”
“Well,” returned Aimée, “let me tell you. As I said before, I do not think it wise to judge people from first impressions, but this I do know, I don't like him as I like Mr. Gowan, and I never shall. He is not to be relied upon, that Gerald Chandos; I saw it in his eyes.”
And she set her chin upon her hand, and her small, round, fair face covered itself all at once with an anxious cloud.
She kept a quiet watch upon Mollie after this, and in the weeks that followed she was puzzled, and not only puzzled, but baffled outright many a time. This first visit of Mr. Gerald Chandos was not his last. His business brought him again and again, and when the time came that he had no pretence of business, he was on sufficiently familiar terms with them all to make calls of pleasure. So he did just as Ralph Gowan had done, slipped into his groove of friend and acquaintance unobtrusively, and was made welcome as other people were,—just as any sufficiently harmless individual would have been under the same circumstances. There was no dragon of high renown to create social disturbances in Vagabondia.
“As long as a man behaves himself, where's the odds?” said Phil; and no one ever disagreed with him.
But Mr. Gerald Chandos had not been to the house more than three times before Aimée found cause to wonder. She discovered that Ralph Gowan was not so enthusiastically attached to him, after all; and furthermore she had her reasons for thinking that Gowan was rather disturbed at his advent, and would have preferred that he had not been adopted so complacently.
“If Dolly was at home,” she said to herself, “I should be inclined to fancy he was a trifle jealous; and if he cared just a little more for Mollie, I might think he was jealous; but Dolly is away, and though he is fond of Mollie, and thinks her pretty, he does n't care for her in that way exactly, so there must be some other reason. He is not the sort of person to have likes or dislikes without reason.”