To Sir Redmond it seemed, as he thought over and over again, that a couple of fatherless and motherless girls living as they curiously did together, and alone 'with no one to look after them but an infernal old pump of a Presbyterian parson,' were fair game to be run after in his own fashion, and Ellinor, as the one possessing less firmness of purpose, was certain to be the most easily netted.
As Sir Redmond led Ellinor away, Colville's brow grew dark as that of Robert Wodrow, and the baronet was not slow to detect this emotion and defy it.
'Was this jealousy and love of Ellinor? Did he admire her and Mary too?' thought the baronet. 'By Jove, it seems so.'
They were long absent from the main body of the guests, none of whom missed them perhaps, save Robert Wodrow and Miss Galloway. How long Colville did not precisely know, as he contrived to be elsewhere engaged himself.
While Mary was talking to old Mrs. Wodrow, who was indulging the while in a few peculiar and not very well-bred, if knowing, nods and smiles in the direction of Miss Galloway, over whose chair on the terrace Captain Colville was stooping, she overheard him say, while the former was prettily making up for him a button-hole of stephenotis, with a white rosebud and maiden-hair fern—and say—with empressement but laughingly,
'If lusty love should go in search of beauty,
Where should he find it fairer than in Blanche?
If zealous love should go in quest of virtue,
Where should he find it purer than in Blanche?
If love, ambitious, sought a match of birth,
Whose veins bound richer blood than Lady Blanche?'
He was only quoting Shakespeare, and did so laughingly, and not at all with the tenderness of love, Mary thought; but Blanche Galloway was evidently delighted, tapped him with her fan in mock anger, and then adjusted her bouquet in his lapelle.
On what terms were they, these two?
Mrs. Wodrow had evidently no doubt about it, as she whispered to Mary,
'How sweet it is to watch young lovers! I was right, you see.'