When she could steal from her aunt's room, we were always together, for Amy knitted bead-purses, made up significant bouquets from the conservatory, read novels, and when we interchanged underlined passages from the poets, showed she had talents for flirtation equal to most young ladies. A week slipped away without any tidings arriving from my employers, and without the arrival of Colonel Rose from India, to raise the siege which has been so long and so successfully laid to his sister-in-law, to whom his deceased brother had so foolishly given the entire control of all he had acquired in the Carnatic, where, at the head of his sepoys, he had bombarded the nabob and looted the dingy natives to some purpose and to some profit.
The life I led was entirely new to me. I was daily associating with this charming young girl, at an age when first the female form begins to awaken new and undefined ideas of delight in the mind of a half-grown youth, and it was impossible for me not to feel all its influences.
In the early morning, when the sun rose above the hills, half veiled in clouds of purple and of gold, and when the battlemented castle, the old grey mansions, and churches of the distant city, seemed to float amid the silver mist that rose from the dewy hollows, we rambled together in the walks of the garden, or on the smooth green velvet lawn, when the first buoyant breeze came over the upland slope, and when the first beam of the tremulous sunshine lit up the dewy leaves; when the birds twitted from branch to branch, shaking off the dew-like diamond drops, and we felt our breasts expand, and our young hearts grow glad and joyous, we knew not why, though poor Amy Lee was often pale with the long vigils she spent by the sick-bed of her aunt. The active mind and real goodness of heart possessed by Amy lent a living light to her eyes and to her features, filling them with a beauty beyond what they might otherwise have possessed.
We were daily together in the sunny little breakfast-parlour, which opened into the brightly-flowered shelves of the conservatory; and then Amy, clad in the most becoming of frilled morning dresses, with her little white hands poured out my coffee, &c., and charmingly did the honours of our little table—and then, thereafter in wandering and in dreams, would pass the day, until evening, when—thank heaven!—the old dame upstairs was cosily tucked in for the night; and then we rambled through the long avenues and evergreen shrubberies, while the brilliant moon shed her silver rays athwart the tall lines of aged sycamores, around which the tendrils of the dark ivy clung; and when the diamond stars shone above in the purest of ether, and we dreamed on, and talked of a thousand things, or often were silent, for at times silence is more eloquent than words, while only the breeze stirred the foliage overhead, and all else was hushed save the beating of our hearts—amid circumstances so conducive to the growth of boyish love and to philandering, who the deuce could resist the passion? Certainly not a day-dreamer like Oliver Ellis.
A second week had nearly elapsed when I received a letter from Macfarisee, announcing, in his curt fashion, that the sooner I returned to town the better, with the papers he had left me to prepare—and to tell Miss Lee that Colonel Rose had arrived in London.
The papers! Until then I had forgotten all about them; and then there was the colonel—for reasons of my own, I felt quite as anxious about him as the worthy conveyancer Macfarisee could have done.
"And what is the colonel, Amy?" I asked, as we sat in a seat of the conservatory, with my arm round her waist, her cheek resting on my shoulder, and her thick curls half enveloping my face.
"An officer of Indian cavalry. I know nothing more."
"Coming home with a fortune—gout in his legs, and cotton in his ears; a blue coat with brass buttons—a yellow face and a bamboo cane."
"Why so?"