Mrs. Hampton was intensely gratified by this unexpected intimacy, of which, however, by failing health, she was, perhaps luckily, unable to avail herself.
To Rookleigh the idea did occur at times, as to how he was to account to Derval for the non-transmission of Clara's letters for him to the ship, the owners, or their agents abroad?
Well—that was a matter for future consideration; meantime he had the signed bond, and that laid Derval at his mercy!
The lovers were meanwhile beginning to think—nay, to be assured—that their worst fears were becoming realised; Clara deeming that Derval, as his brother had alleged, was "a very sailor"; and he, that Clara was only true to the instincts of her cold-blooded class, and had already forgotten him, or cast him off, for some new, richer, and titled object; and Rookleigh rubbed his long lean hands, and puckered up his green eyes with quaint delight, as the plot seemed to thicken.
Clara had never striven even to like him, though the brother of that Derval she had loved so well—nay, loved in secret still. She saw the base metal in his composition, and always detected a something in the tone of his voice, and in the expression of his face, that roused an undefinable emotion of distrust, as belying in some way the ease and nonchalance of manner he affected.
"We are a kind of cousins, you know, Miss Hampton," said he one day, as he hung over her at the piano.
"I do not know that we are," she replied coldly.
"Permit me to explain to you the degree," and he proceeded to do so with extreme accuracy, as he had just been studying the matter with Mr. De Murrer, affecting to act in the interest of his absent brother, but in reality for his own selfish purposes. But she only laughed aloud, and said:
"It is rather remote."
"It would not be thought so, in Scotland."