“I said you were not to talk nonsense now,” said Cynthia, shaking her pretty little head at him.
“Oh, murder!” he exclaimed, suddenly. “Hadn’t you better drive on? Here’s Perry-Morton.”
“No, no,” exclaimed the younger girl, “it would look so rude. You silly thing, don’t blush so,” she whispered to her sister; “it looks so strange.”
“Good-morning—” said the subject of the thoughts of the group; and Mr Perry-Morton descended poetically upon them, for he did not seem to walk up like an ordinary being. “Cynthia,” he continued, with an air of affectionate solicitude, and leaving out the full-stops he had placed after his two first words, “you look too flushed this morning, my child. Julia, is not the morning charming? Did you notice the effect of light and shade across the water?”
Julia Mallow, who looked troubled and bored, replied that she had not.
“You observed it, of course, Mr Magnus?” continued the new-comer, with a sweet smile.
“No,” said the gentleman addressed, shortly. “I was talking to the ladies.”
“Ah! yes,” said Mr Perry-Morton, sweetly; and he held his head on one side, as if he were posing for a masculine Penseroso. “But Nature will appeal so to our inmost heart.”
“Yes, she’s a jolly nuisance sometimes,” said Lord Artingale, but only to evoke a pitying smile from Mr Perry-Morton, who, in spite of the decidedly annoyed looks of Cynthia and her lover, leaned his arm upon the carriage-door, and began talking to Julia, making James Magnus look like Harry Hotspur must have appeared when the “certain lord” came to him, holding the “pouncet box, which ever and anon he gave his nose.”
Cynthia Mallow made a pretty little grimace at Artingale, and, then turning with a smile to the worshipper of Nature, she stretched out her hand for the check-string so unmistakably that the gentlemen drew back, and raised their hats as the carriage rejoined the stream.