Nan smothered a sigh. Thus was Fanny wont to carry off the interest and sympathy of the spectator, whatever she did, on the stage or off it—if she was ever really off the stage. Miss Lockhart now spoke sternly to her inner self: “Don’t be a prig, Nancy! Admit she’s perfectly stunning to look at, and she has the right to mourn her uncle if she wants to. She didn’t have to make a dowd of herself to do it, just so other women wouldn’t be envious.”
“Yes, she is a beauty,” she answered, in her usual generous way. “And I’m sure it was a great loss.”
And then she found herself almost instantly a supernumerary, as she was quite accustomed to be when with her friend in the company of any man on earth. After one ardent embrace, during which Fanny murmured the most affectionate of greetings in her ear—“You old darling—what it means to get back to you!”—it was Cary to whom the newcomer turned, and toward whom she remained turned—so to speak—throughout the walk home. Nan had to concede to herself, as she kept pace with the pair beside her, that Cary was doing his part most thoroughly, and that Fanny could not justly be blamed for giving him her attention. Before they had reached the house it began to look to Nan as if Fanny’s mourning had gone to Cary’s head!
She left them in the library, knowing well what was expected of her, and went upstairs wondering, as she had wondered a thousand times before, just why she cared so much for Fanny Fitch. And then, as a thousand times before, she found the explanation. To do Fanny entire justice, she was not one of the girls who find no time or taste for others of their own sex. Nobody could be more fascinating than she to Nan herself, when quite alone with her. Never down at heel or ragged at elbow in moments of privacy, always making herself charming from sheer love of her own alluring image in the mirror, capable of the most clever and entertaining talk when the mood took her, though there might be no man’s eye or ear within reach—it was impossible not indeed quite to adore her. Nan’s soberer yet highly intelligent self found a curiously satisfying complement at times in Fanny’s lighter but far more versatile personality. It was only when the more irresponsible and reckless side of the other girl’s nature came uppermost that Nan found herself critical and sometimes deeply disapproving and resentful.
It was a full hour before Fanny came upstairs. Nan had been waiting for her in the guest’s room, where she had had the luggage taken. As Fanny came in, the look of her struck Nan afresh as being past all precedent attractive and appealing. Her colour was now heightened, evidently by the interview with Cary, and her eyes were full of all manner of strange lights. She had not yet removed her hat, and somehow the whole effect of her was that of one poised but a moment at a resting place on a journey full of both excitement and peril.
The two met in the middle of the large and airy room.
“Well, dear—and aren’t you going to take off your hat and settle down?” Nan put up her hand to remove the demurely becoming hat in question. “Why didn’t you take it off downstairs and rest your head?”
“I felt better armoured for defense with it. Never mind taking it off—I’m going out again.”
“Did you need defense, then?”
“Doesn’t one, when a determined young man wants to marry one out of hand? I’ve only succeeded in putting him off for an hour or two, at that. He says he may go any day, and on seeing me just now he realized he couldn’t go without leaving me behind securely tied. What do you think of that, for a poor girl just from a funeral, to be confronted with a wedding?”