“I am sure I don’t want to leave you,” said George, looking affectionately at his mother and sister. “I have never been made so happy by anything as by finding you.”
Mrs Mansen and her daughter were indeed two relatives of whom any one might be proud. The mother was a little past middle age, but was still strikingly handsome, and though her dress differed in some particulars from that of an English lady, she would have passed muster, both as regards appearance and manners, in good English society. Her daughter nearly resembled her in height and feature; and if the reader could have seen her, he would not have been surprised that even the ponderous Rudolf Kransberg should have been captivated by her charms. She was a lively girl in her nineteenth year, and, as yet, fancy-free. It had never occurred to her that Mynheer Rudolf had viewed her with any sentiment of admiration; and we are afraid that, if the idea had entered her head, it would have had no other effect than that of affording her unmixed amusement.
“And it isn’t father only,” pursued Thyrza, “who wants you to remain at Umtongo. There’s another person—”
“Redgy Margetts, I suppose,” interrupted George. “I have no doubt he likes his quarters well enough—”
“Mr Margetts!” broke in Thyrza hastily, and with a little accession of colour; “I wasn’t thinking about him. I don’t suppose he knows his mind on that subject or any other. No, it is a different person altogether—”
“My dear Thyrza,” interposed Mrs Mansen, “there is your father out in the garden, beckoning. He wants you, I am pretty sure. Go out and speak to him.”
Thyrza departed, and Mrs Mansen, after a pause of a minute or two, addressed her son in a tone of some embarrassment.
“I am sorry you said that about Mr Margetts,” she said—“sorry for two reasons. In the first place, I fancy—if indeed it is only fancy—that he is attracted by Thyrza.”
“Redgy is as easily attracted by a handsome girl as a bee is by a honeysuckle,” said George; “but his attachment does not generally last much longer.”
“I hope you may be right,” returned his mother; “but I own I think otherwise. I grant Thyrza either does not see, or does not much care for, his preference. But how long that might continue, I do not know.”