"Well, that makes it all the stronger: we have known each other but four days, and here we are jesting with every word—'Charles' here, 'Ernest' there—as though we had been acquainted twenty years."
"Such an acquaintance might be possible for you—it is not for me," Hoffland said, laughing; "but I find you very generous. You have not added the strongest evidence of my wayward familiarity—that I advised you to put your sister on her guard against my fascinations. Let her take care! Else shall she be a love-sick girl—the most amusing spectacle, I think, in all the world!"
With which words Hoffland laughed so merrily and with such a musical, ringing, contagious joy, that Mowbray's feeling of pique at this unceremonious allusion to his sister passed away completely, and he could not utter a word.
They passed on thus to the college, conversing about a thousand things; and Mowbray saw with the greatest surprise that his companion possessed a mind of remarkable clearness and justness. His comments upon every subject were characterized by a laughing satire which played around men and things like summer lightning, and by the time they had reached Lord Botetourt's statue, Mowbray was completely silent. He listened.[(Back to Table of Content.)]
CHAPTER XII.
HOW HOFFLAND CAUGHT A TARTAR IN THE PERSON OF MISS LUCY'S LOVER.
The day was not to end as quietly as Mowbray dreamed, and we shall now proceed to relate the incidents which followed this conversation.
Upon the smooth-shaven lawn, at various distances from each other, were stretched parties of students, who either bent their brows over volumes of Greek or Latin—or interchanged merry conversation, which passed around like an elastic ball—or leaning their heads upon overturned chairs, suffered to curl upward from their lazy lips white wreaths of smoke which turned to floods of gold in the red sunset, while the calm pipe-holders dreamed of that last minuet and the blue eyes shrining it in memory, then of the reel through which she darted with such joyous sparkling eyes and rosy cheeks—and so went on and dreamed and sighed, then sighed and dreamed again. We are compelled to add that the devotees of conversation and the dreamers outnumbered the delvers into Greek and Latin, to a really deplorable degree.
It is so difficult to study out upon the grass which May has filled with flowers—so very easy to lie there and idly talk or dream!
Through these groups Mowbray and his friend took their way, noticed only with a careless glance by the studious portion when their shadows fell upon the open volumes—not at all by the talkers—and scarcely more by the dreamers, who lazily moved their heads as smokers only can—with a silent protest, that is to say, at having their reveries disturbed, and being compelled to take such enormous trouble and exertion.