There was a small apartment opening out of the drawingroom, fitted up as a boudoir for the benefit of Caroline Selby. In this snuggery the two young ladies had been looking over some water-colour sketches, but Caroline Selby had just been called away, and the Rosebud was left by herself. At that instant Ernest joined her.
“Emily,” he said, and his voice was low and tremulous—“Emily, I have come to bid you good-bye.”
“Must you go already?” was the rejoinder.
“Indeed, I fear so,” returned Ernest. There was a pause, and then he resumed, in a voice which trembled with emotion, “Emily, we have been very happy of late.”
“Oh, yes!” she murmured, almost unconsciously.
“And you,” he continued—“you have been very kind and gentle. Emily, you will not forget me—will not grow cold towards me again?”
She made no reply, but her silence was more eloquent than words. At that moment Mr. Selby’s footstep sounded on the stairs.
“I must go,” Ernest resumed: “Emily, dear Emily! goodbye;—God bless you!” He took her soft, warm little hand in his own; she allowed him to retain it unresistingly: he pressed it, and his heart beat quickly when he felt the pressure faintly but unmistakably returned. With a sudden impulse he raised the little hand, still imprisoned in his, to his lips, kissed it, and tore himself away. As he paused to close the door, a slight sound caught his ear: could it be a sob?
How long it might have been after his departure ere the noise of approaching voices roused Emily from the mental abstraction into which she had fallen, that young lady herself never knew—it might have been one minute, it might have been ten. When she did awake to a sense of outward things, the following speech from the lips of Mrs. Selby, a good-natured, vulgar woman, arrested her attention:—
“And so, ma’am, if Sir Thomas Crawley dies, which my husband fears is only too probable, Mr. Carrington is as likely to be his heir as anybody I can think of.”