"And now I must tell you my name—Audley Trevelyan, late of the 14th Hussars."
"I have surely heard it before," said Sybil, pondering, "but where I know not now."
It was in the Gazette together with that of Denzil, but she had forgotten the circumstance, and he said, smiling still,
"You may easily have heard it—the name is peculiar to Cornwall, and my uncle is Lord Lamorna."
"Indeed! all Cornwall has heard that the late lord was a very, very proud man.
"Absurdly so; but I must bid you adieu. Rose Trecarrel is impatient."
"We are going, Mr. Trevelyan," said that young lady, with some asperity of tone, from the window of the carriage in which she and her sister were seated; and lifting his hat, Audley hastened to join them. The footman threw up the carriage-steps, fussily closed the door, and they departed. So, as doubtless the reader has foreseen, Sybil's admirer was her own cousin; yet neither knew of the relationship.
She drove off in a somewhat dubious state of mind, amid which, as she permitted the reins to drop listlessly on the backs of her two little ponies and allowed them to go at their own pace, she gave way to the current of thought, and ended in a quiet shower of tears, which, however, calmed and soothed her. She had an undefined emotion of pique alike at this stranger, Mr. Trevelyan, and Rose Trecarrel; and as she had been learning to love the former, she resented his extreme intimacy with the latter, and she knew all the perils of propinquity with a girl so lovely as Rose undoubtedly was.
Hence, more than ever did she resolve to avoid him, and even sought to nurse herself into emotions of anger by fancying there was something that savoured of forwardness in the mode in which he had recently addressed her. The moment she reached home and tossed the reins to the groom, she hastened to the side of Constance.
"Oh, mamma," she exclaimed, in a tumult of excitement, "I have discovered the name of the gentleman about whom you spoke to me lately!"