“We will all go,” said Mr. Tallant. “Come along, Mr. Phillips! you are interested in these things; for my part, I know little about them.”
They saw the flowers and discussed their merits, and then, somehow or other, Mr. Hammerton found himself engaged in a deep conversation with Miss Tallant and Amy; and by-and-by he was alone with Miss Somerton, and he was all graciousness and gentle words then.
Once she felt his breath warm upon her cheek, and once he pressed her hand. She blushed, and the tears came into her eyes, why or wherefore she could not tell. And then Lionel pressed her hand again, and said what a delightful creature Miss Tallant was to leave him alone with her dear friend.
He gathered a rose and playfully hung it in her hair, and then he asked her if she remembered the poetic legend of the origin of the red rose. “Roses were all white originally when first they bloomed in Eden. Eve, when first she saw the beautiful flower, could not suppress her admiration, and in her joy at its beauty she stooped down and imprinted a kiss on its snowy bosom. The rose stole the scarlet tinge from her velvet lip, and wears it yet. So goes the story; I cannot give you the authority, but the tradition is poetic; is it not?”
Amy looked up and smiled, and Lionel knew that she loved him. The most secret page of her story was before him, and he read it with pride and satisfaction.
Lionel went on talking all kinds of loving trifles which in anyone else’s mouth would have seemed ridiculous to Amy; but she could only weep at them and feel a strange fluttering at her heart as she listened to him and walked with him in the shadiest and most remote paths of the Barton Hall gardens.
In the evening Mr. Christopher Tallant returned from town, and was greatly surprised to find his son at Barton Hall; and equally astonished the next morning to find that he had risen for the morning mail, and gone back to London.
CHAPTER XII.
BENEATH THE GOWN.
Paul Somerton had improved that friendship started at the Ashford Club, and had latterly dropped the evening society of Thomas Dibble. He had made the discovery in search of which Mr. Dibble had been useful to him, and since then he had preferred working at the mine alone.