“Very jolly place, isn’t it?” said Lord Lambeth. “It’s a very jolly place to sit.”
“Very charming,” said the young girl. “I often sit here; there are all kinds of cozy corners—as if they had been made on purpose.”
“Ah! I suppose you have had some of them made,” said the young man.
Miss Alden looked at him a moment. “Oh no, we have had nothing made. It’s pure nature.”
“I should think you would have a few little benches—rustic seats and that sort of thing. It might be so jolly to sit here, you know,” Lord Lambeth went on.
“I am afraid we haven’t so many of those things as you,” said the young girl thoughtfully.
“I daresay you go in for pure nature, as you were saying. Nature over here must be so grand, you know.” And Lord Lambeth looked about him.
The little coast line hereabouts was very pretty, but it was not at all grand, and Miss Alden appeared to rise to a perception of this fact. “I am afraid it seems to you very rough,” she said. “It’s not like the coast scenery in Kingsley’s novels.”
“Ah, the novels always overdo it, you know,” Lord Lambeth rejoined. “You must not go by the novels.”
They were wandering about a little on the rocks, and they stopped and looked down into a narrow chasm where the rising tide made a curious bellowing sound. It was loud enough to prevent their hearing each other, and they stood there for some moments in silence. The young girl looked at her companion, observing him attentively, but covertly, as women, even when very young, know how to do. Lord Lambeth repaid observation; tall, straight, and strong, he was handsome as certain young Englishmen, and certain young Englishmen almost alone, are handsome; with a perfect finish of feature and a look of intellectual repose and gentle good temper which seemed somehow to be consequent upon his well-cut nose and chin. And to speak of Lord Lambeth’s expression of intellectual repose is not simply a civil way of saying that he looked stupid. He was evidently not a young man of an irritable imagination; he was not, as he would himself have said, tremendously clever; but though there was a kind of appealing dullness in his eye, he looked thoroughly reasonable and competent, and his appearance proclaimed that to be a nobleman, an athlete, and an excellent fellow was a sufficiently brilliant combination of qualities. The young girl beside him, it may be attested without further delay, thought him the handsomest young man she had ever seen; and Bessie Alden’s imagination, unlike that of her companion, was irritable. He, however, was also making up his mind that she was uncommonly pretty.