Colville, who resented as absurd and infra dig. Mary's desire of maintaining herself and adding to the slender patrimony their father had left them, brought an invitation from Mrs. Deroubigne, in whose care they were to be left for the future—certainly for a time at least; and she received them with open arms, and a welcome all the more warm that she was just then alone, her two little daughters being absent at a boarding establishment; and, amid the new comforts and ease that surrounded her in Grosvenor Square, Mary forgot for a time the old wish of her heart to go 'home,' as she ever considered Birkwoodbrae her home.
At the commencement of the present century, Malcolm says 'that this square is the very focus of feudal grandeur, religion, fashion, taste, and hospitality, and that the novel-reader must be intimately acquainted with the description of residents within it, when the words "Grosvenor Square" are to be found in almost every work of that species written in the compass of fifty years past.'
Before the house of Mrs. Deroubigne were still to be seen iron link-extinguishers, a remnant of the past, when links were carried before carriages at the West-End till 1807. Though old-fashioned, the mansion was a lofty and stately one; and Mary, when she gazed upon the tall windows on the spacious square and the landscape garden in the centre, with its old trees planted by Kent, wondered if she was the same Mary Wellwood who for so many weeks past had contemplated the frowsy view from the windows of her late abode.
In her regard for Colville, and inspired no doubt by memories of the past and the dead, Mrs. Deroubigne, to do her justice, was unwavering in her kindness and hospitality to her new friends; and times there were when she actually, amid her dream-thoughts, seemed to forget her own married life, and her heart yearned, warmly and strangely, to the two orphan girls of her old lover—the girls who might, she averred laughingly, have been her own daughters, had fate so arranged it.
'Your face, Mary, always reminds me of your father,' she would say, taking the girl's dimpled cheeks caressingly between her hands; 'but yours, Ellinor, suggests to me more of your mamma—you have the same dreamy hazel eyes. And you are romantic, no doubt?' she added, with a fond smile.
'Perhaps; every girl has, it is said, at least one romance in the course of her life,' said Ellinor, thinking of poor Robert Wodrow and the wretched Sleath.
'And, certainly, I have had mine!' said Mrs. Deroubigne, kissing Mary, while old memories floated through her mind, known and clear to herself alone.
Mary thought that though it might be delightful in summer to visit Birkwoodbrae, with Mrs. Deroubigne as a chaperone, she would never go back to it as a home on sufferance—on that she was resolved; and until she was a wedded wife she could but wait in hope, love, and confidence; besides, Mrs. Deroubigne, at Colville's suggestion, had a plan for a little tour on the Continent to occupy some of the time of his absence, and to make the sisters forget some of the mortifications they had recently undergone.
Though the temporary loss of Mary and the mystery involving her movements—her very fate after leaving Perthshire—had so tortured the heart of Colville that he had resolved to seek for change amid the stirring scenes of Eastern war once more, he felt that he could now leave England with emotions of comparative happiness and content.
He knew that she was in safety—surrounded by every comfort, even by splendour—and had been saved from much he could not quite foresee, by the slender but blessed chance of her meeting with Mrs. Deroubigne!