'Nor can she always have you; and what then?' said Colville, lightly touching her hand, and lowering his voice in a way that to some there would have been no mistaking; but Mary, devoid of vanity, was all unconscious of it, and, disliking to talk about herself, now talked of other things.
Again and again Colville thought, in her perfect sweetness, humility, and composure, how utterly dissimilar she was in many ways from the town-bred girls he had been wont to meet in his London life especially, where the beautiful was so often combined with the artificial, and even youth with utter hollowness of heart. Amid dinners, garden-parties, the Row, and the general rôle of his life as a Guardsman, the pet of many a woman and her fair brood, all the more that he was now the inheritor of a revenue that was great, he had been conscious of all that.
To Mary—who was a close observer in her way—it sometimes seemed that there was in Captain Colville's face, when he addressed her, a half-amused expression, mingling with much of undoubted admiration. The first was occasionally a source of pique to her; and the other was a source of pique, too, rather than pleasure; for, if he was the fiancé of Miss Galloway, he had no business to amuse himself with, or bestow admiration on, any other young lady, and these ideas made her manner to him reserved at times.
In being assisted over an awkward stone stile, though she required no aid, yet she was compelled to take his proffered grasp, but even then unconsciously her
'Very coldness still was kind,
And tremulously gentle her small hand
Withdrew itself from his, but left behind
A little pressure, thrilling, and so bland
And slight, that to the mind 'twas but a doubt.'
As her slim hand was quickly withdrawn from his, and she murmured her 'thanks,' Mary's first thought was that it was cased in a somewhat too well-worn glove, and Colville perhaps remarked this too, for he said,
'Do you always wear gauntlet gloves?'
'No; but then I am so much in the garden among thorns and bushes that ordinary gloves are useless, and I used to get through so many of six and a quarter.'
'Surely even that is too large for a hand like yours,' said he; and Mary now fairly blushed at the tenor of the conversation, and when he attempted again to take her shapely little hand in his she resolutely withheld it, and, thinking of Blanche Galloway, said,
'Please don't, Captain Colville; and now I must bid you farewell, with many thanks for your escort.'