"Monsieur Aristabule" said Pierre, eyeing the card, but sticking at the first name.
Mr. Aristabulus Bragg was advancing with an easy assurance to make his bow to the ladies, when the more finished air and quiet dignity of Miss Effingham, who was standing, so far disconcerted him, as completely to upset his self-possession. As Grace had expressed it, in consequence of having lived three years in the old residence at Templeton, he had begun to consider himself a part of the family, and at home he never spoke of the young lady without calling her "Eve," or "Eve Effingham." But he found it a very different thing to affect familiarity among his associates, and to practise it in the very face of its subject; and, although seldom at a loss for words of some sort or another, he was now actually dumb-founded. Eve relieved his awkwardness by directing Pierre, with her eye, to hand a chair, and first speaking.
"I regret that my father is not in," she said, by way of turning the visit from herself; "but he is to be expected every moment. Are you lately from Templeton?"
Aristabulus drew his breath, and recovered enough of his ordinary tone of manner to reply with a decent regard to his character for self-command. The intimacy that he had intended to establish on the spot, was temporarily defeated, it is true, and without his exactly knowing how it had been effected; for it was merely the steadiness of the young lady, blended as it was with a polished reserve, that had thrown him to a distance he could not explain. He felt immediately, and with taste that did his sagacity credit, that his footing in this quarter was only to be obtained by unusually slow and cautious means. Still, Mr. Bragg was a man of great decision, and, in his way, of very far-sighted views; and, singular as it may seem, at that unpropitious moment, he mentally determined that, at no very distant day, he would make Miss Eve Effingham his wife.
"I hope Mr. Effingham enjoys good health," he said, with some such caution as a rebuked school-girl enters on the recitation of her task--"he enjoyed bad health I hear, (Mr. Aristabulus Bragg, though so shrewd, was far from critical in his modes of speech) when he went to Europe, and after travelling so far in such bad company, it would be no more than fair that he should have a little respite as he approaches home and old age."
Had Eve been told that the man who uttered this nice sentiment, and that too in accents as uncouth and provincial as the thought was finished and lucid, actually presumed to think of her as his bosom companion, it is not easy to say which would have predominated in her mind, mirth or resentment. But Mr. Bragg was not in the habit of letting his secrets escape him prematurely, and certainly this was one that none but a wizard could have discovered without the aid of a direct oral or written communication.
"Are you lately from Templeton?" repeated Eve a little surprised that the gentleman did not see fit to answer the question, which was the only one that, as it seemed to her, could have a common interest with them both.
"I left home the day before yesterday," Aristabulus now deigned to reply.
"It is so long since I saw our beautiful mountains and I was then so young, that I feel a great impatience to revisit them, though the pleasure must be deferred until spring."
"I conclude they are the handsomest mountains in the known world, Miss Effingham!"