"It's up-hill work—very!" she said to her own heart. "And I'm making this other poor fellow sadly wretched. He's like the people one reads about in a novel. He never complains. I wish he would! I wish he'd scold me well, and tell me what a beast I am!"
Touching his arm with her fan, while she made some trifling observation, it cut her to the quick to observe how his face brightened up, like a dog's at the voice of its master; and for the first time Mrs. Lascelles found herself entertaining a vague suspicion that it might be unwise as well as unfeeling to throw away so much confiding adoration, to barter a reality that would last her lifetime, for a mere fancy, less tangible and less permanent than a dream. So, with half-a-dozen kind words, meaning nothing, she lifted this simple young man to the seventh heaven of transport, reaping, from her own act, the quiet satisfaction that follows such deeds of benevolence and common humanity.
Meanwhile, Frank had risen to go. Carefully abstaining from the slightest glance in Miss Hallaton's direction, he took an exceedingly affectionate leave of Miss Ross, and resumed his stall, which was next to that of Sir Henry, fastening a gardenia, with some little pretension, in his button-hole.
"Been on the war-path," thought Sir Henry, waking up from a doze and observing this lately-won decoration. "Quick work. Taken a scalp already, and hanging it on his belt." Then he remembered his own daughter was in the house, and meditated grimly on the deadly penalties he would exact from any man who should be so rash as to trifle with Helen; consoled, however, by the reflection that she was the last girl in the world to yield even so light a trophy as a flower to one who had not earned it in honourable and legitimate warfare.
"What's the attraction, Jin?" asked Mrs. Lascelles, with something of irritation in her tone. "You've never taken your glasses off one spot in the stalls for the last ten minutes! Will you share the object amongst us, or must you keep it all to yourself?"
Miss Ross was never at a loss.
"It's the tower of Babel, dear," she answered, good humouredly, "before the confusion of tongues. Did you ever see such a head! There, two rows behind Sir Henry Hallaton. The woman in pink, with all those beads wound round her, bangles on her arms, and, I do believe, a fish-bone through her nose! I can see it, I'm sure, when she turns this way!" Thus Jin, with her glasses in her lap, with mirth and mischief in her eyes, to all appearance with no sentiment but ridicule in her heart.
Miss Ross deserved credit, I think, for unscrupulous invention and readiness of resource, also for the quickness with which she pounced on the woman in pink, a respectable matron, whose head-gear, modelled after that of a notorious Parisian impropriety, was simply such as she saw worn by ladies of her own station and repute every night of her life.
Jin would have studied this apparition perhaps more attentively, but that her whole soul was projecting itself, as it were, through her glasses, towards Frank Vanguard and his gardenia. She did not regret giving it him now. She was falling horribly in love with him. How she would have hated Helen, she thought, but that she could afford to pity her!
I have said this enthusiast really enjoyed an opera, loving fine even more dearly than pretty music.