“Why should you not when he is so?” returned Alice, innocently.
Harry turned his head away to conceal a smile which the naïveté of the reply had called forth, muttering to himself as he did so, “Poor Crane!”
After a few minutes’ silence, Alice began abruptly, and apologetically,—
“I’m sure I ought to feel very much obliged to you, Mr. Coverdale—and indeed I do; this is the second really good-natured thing you’ve done by me to-day.”
The tone in which she spoke so completely betrayed that surprise was the feeling uppermost in her mind, that Harry, slightly piqued, could not help replying—
“You did not, then, give me credit for possessing the least particle of good-nature?”
Alice smiled as she answered—
“If I had had a proper degree of faith in Arthur’s representations, I need not have felt surprise.”
The delicate irony of this reply was not lost upon Coverdale; but he knew that he had deserved it, and, with the ready frankness which was one of his best characteristics, he hastened to acknowledge it.
“I certainly have done little towards practically vindicating the character your brother’s partiality has bestowed upon me,” he said; “but I must be allowed to plead in justification, that I am quite aware of my own deficiencies, and told Arthur that I had been roughing it abroad so long, that I was totally unfitted for ladies’ society. He would not admit the excuse; but it was a full, true, and sufficient one, nevertheless.”