Charles Tyrrell then immediately came up to her, and though his face was a good deal flushed and his eyes still flashing, he applied himself gently and tenderly to sooth her. When she was a little calmed, he said, "How can I apologize to you, Miss Effingham, for the manner in which I have been obliged to treat a person in your presence, who, perhaps, may at one time have been dear to you?"
"To me, Mr. Tyrrell!" exclaimed Lucy, with unfeigned astonishment in every feature. "To me! Good God, what could make you dream of such a thing? I hate and abhor him, and have always done so."
"He told me his name was Hargrave!" exclaimed Charles, in equal surprise.
"So it is," replied Lucy, alternately blushing and turning pale, merely with agitation. "If you have heard anything of him, as I suppose you have, it can but be that he has persecuted me in a most unmanly manner; insulted my poor father not long before his death, and deprived me of the power of going out of our house in Northumberland without distress and annoyance."
She spoke eagerly, and Charles Tyrrell could not doubt that she spoke sincerely, for bright candour and frankness were in every line of her countenance, and her heightened colour and her beaming eye seemed to say that she looked upon the very thought of loving such a man as injurious to her. To Charles her words, her look, her manner, were all a relief. It seemed as if a load were taken from his heart, and he had by no means such command over his countenance as not to look the joy he felt, or over his conduct as not to express the hope to which her words gave rise.
"Oh, Miss Effingham," he said, "you do not know, you cannot conceive, you can form not even an idea, of the joy, the satisfaction that your words afford me."
The change of his manner and of his countenance, the sparkling hope that lit up his look, could hardly be mistaken, even though Lucy was a novice in such things. If she had been agitated by a mixture of fear and annoyance before, new emotions now took possession of her. She looked no more up in the face of Charles Tyrrell; she dropped her eyes towards the ground; the colour became still more heightened in her cheek, and spread over her whole face, and Charles felt the hand, that he had taken to draw her arm within his own, trembling with agitation in his grasp.
All he saw, however, gave him hope, as well as all that he had heard.
"Oh, Lucy," he said, "I have been deeply mistaken. I have bitterly and painfully deceived myself during the last month. It has been reported, and the report reached my ears, that you were attached to this man, to this Lieutenant Hargrave."
"Good Heaven!" exclaimed Lucy, "who could spread such a report? Surely he could not have the wickedness to say such a thing himself, when he knew how I contemned and reprobated him; when he knew that his return had made me break off my acquaintance with his sister. But, now I think of it, it was more likely his sister herself, who, I remember, in her wild and thoughtless way, declared one day before some other people that I was in love with her brother, because I praised, without knowing them to be his, some drawings that all the rest were condemning. But could you--could you suppose that I could love such a man?"