"The anecdote is almost childish, but I am not such a child as to be ashamed of relating it. I was one day rambling over the wood at Rushfield Park, with my rifle in my hand tired of shooting at a mark. There started a hare at a tempting distance from me, I fired. A slight appearance of ruffled fur alone told me that he was hit. He ran leisurely away, and described a circle round me, till approaching within a few paces he lay meekly down, and died. I know not wherefore, but the death of this hare was indescribably touching to me. It was not the mere death: I had killed hundreds before, and often had to despatch by a blow those only wounded. But this one had died so meekly, without a cry, without a struggle, and had come to die so piteously at the feet of him who had shot it, that I took a sudden disgust to the sport, and have never fired a gun since at either hare or partridge."
There was a slight pause. The emotion of the speaker communicated itself to the audience, and Mrs. Meredith Vyner, with tears in her eyes, declared, that for her part she so well understood what his feelings must have been, that she must have hated him (hated was said with the prettiest accent in the world), if he had not relinquished shooting on the spot.
Violet would have said the same, but her mother having volunteered the observation, closed her mouth. She really felt what her mother only spoke; but the intuitive knowledge of her mother's insincerity—the thorough appreciation of the tear which so sentimentally sparkled on that mother's eyelid—made her dread lest any expression of her own sentiments should be confounded with such affectation, and she was silent.
Cecil was hurt at her silence. The more so as she did not even look at him, but kept her eyes fixed upon her plate.
Meredith Vyner, who had been vainly beating his brains for a pat quotation, now gave up the attempt and said,—
"But then, my dear, you have so much sensibility! Why, I vow if the story hasn't brought tears into her eyes—
Humor et in genas
Furtim labitur.
Certainly, there never was a more tender-hearted creature—nor one shrinking so much from the infliction of even the smallest pain."
Vyner, as he finished his sentence, turned aside his head to fill his nose with a pinch of snuff adequate to the occasion—as if it was only in some vociferous demonstration of the kind that he could supply eloquence capable of properly setting forth his wife's sensibility.
At the mention of her tender-heartedness, both Marmaduke and Violet, involuntarily looked at her, and as they withdrew their eyes, their gaze met. No words can translate the language which passed in that gaze: it was but a second in duration, and yet in that second each soul was laid bare to the eyes of each. The ironical smile which had stolen over their eyes changed, like the glancing hues on a dove's neck, from irony to surprise, from surprise to mutual assent, from assent to superb contempt. Marmaduke and Violet had never met before, yet in that one glance each said to the other, "So, you know this woman! You appreciate her sincerity! You know what a cruel hypocrite she is!"