“Offend me! Nothing.”—This was uttered in a perfect tone of surprise.
“How is it that you avoid me as you do, and will not allow me one moment’s speech with you? You are driving me to distraction.”
“Why, you foolish man!” she answered, half playfully, pressing the palms of her little hands together, and looking up in his face, “how can I? Don’t you see how those two dear old ladies swallow me up in their faddles? Oh, dear? Oh, dear! I wish they would go. Then it would be all right again—wouldn’t it?”
But Hugh was not to be so easily satisfied.
“Before they came, ever since that night—”
“Hush-sh!” she interrupted, putting her finger on his lips, and looking hurriedly round her with an air of fright, of which he could hardly judge whether it was real or assumed—“hush!”
Comforted wondrously by the hushing finger, Hugh would yet understand more.
“I am no baby, dear Euphra,” he said, taking hold of the hand to which the finger belonged, and laying it on his mouth; “do not make one of me. There is some mystery in all this—at least something I do not understand.”
“I will tell you all about it one day. But, seriously, you must be careful how you behave to me; for if my uncle should, but for one moment, entertain a suspicion—good-bye to you—perhaps good-bye to Arnstead. All my influence with him comes from his thinking that I like him better than anybody else. So you must not make the poor old man jealous. By the bye,” she went on—rapidly, as if she would turn the current of the conversation aside—“what a favourite you have grown with him! You should have heard him talk of you to the old ladies. I might well be jealous of you. There never was a tutor like his.”
Hugh’s heart smote him that the praise of even this common man, proud of his own vanity, should be undeserved by him. He was troubled, too, at the flippancy with which Euphra spoke; yet not the less did he feel that he loved her passionately.