“That’s right!” whispered Nelly. “I do love to see you laugh; it makes you look so handsome. I say, Charley, I do wish you had been my brother! But now, I say, do declare you won’t come unless they let me dine with you all. I am so sick of the schoolroom.”
Poor Nelly! Inadvertently she kept touching chords that thrilled in Charley Vining’s breast; but he beat back the feelings, and laughingly said aloud that he thought he should not be able to come.
“O, really,” shrieked Mrs Bray, “I shall be so disappointed!”
Laura looked pained, but she did not direct her eyes Vining-ward.
“I find that a particular old friend of mine is not coming to dinner,” said Charley, “and therefore I shall decline.”
“O, really, my dear Vining,” said Mr Bray, ceasing to warm the tails of his coat, “don’t say so; give us his name, and we’ll invite him at once.”
“’Tain’t a him at all,” cried the ungrammatical one, jumping up, laughing, and clapping her hands; “it’s a her, and it’s me; so there now—you must have me to dinner, after all. And why not, I should like to know. I’m only an inch shorter than pa.”
So Nelly dined with them that day, and Charley took her down, and sat between her and Laura, “behaving more jolly than ever he did before,” so Nelly vowed; while Laura could not but own to the quiet, staid, gentlemanly tact with which he avoided all the past; and trembling and hopeful, she watched him unseen the whole evening.
He did not, neither did she, seek a tête-à-tête; but at the first opportunity Nelly dragged him aside in one of the drawing-rooms, under the pretence of showing him pictures; and though Laura saw all, she did not stir.
“That’s pretty, ain’t it?” said Nelly. “I sketched that.” Then in a low voice, “You like me, Charley, don’t you?”