“If I don’t hear from William Maubray before Sunday, I shall write on Monday morning to Doctor Sprague,” said she, after a long silence at breakfast.
She looked at Violet, but the young lady was looking on the cloth, and with her finger-tips stirring hither and thither some flowers that lay there—not her eyes, only her long eyelashes were visible—and the invitation to say something conveyed in Aunt Dinah’s glance, miscarried.
“And I think it very strange—not what I should have expected from William—that he has not written. I don’t mean an apology, that’s a matter between his own conscience and his Maker. I mean some little inquiry. Affection, of course we cannot command, but respect and courtesy we may.”
“I had thought better of William. I think Doctor Sprague will be surprised,” she resumed. “I did not think he could have parted on the terms he did, and never written a line after for nearly a week. He seems to me quite a changed person.”
“Just at that age,” said Miss Violet, in a low tone, looking nearer to her flowers, and growing interested in a rose whose rumpled leaves she was adjusting with her finger-tips, “some one says—I read it lately somewhere—I forget who—they grow weary of home and home faces, and want change and adventure, that is action and danger, of one kind or another, what they are sent into the world for, I suppose—that and liberty.” She spoke very low, as if to her flowers, and when she ceased Miss Perfect, finding she had no more to say, added—
“And a wise business they make of it—fifty blunders in as many days, and begin looking out for wives before they know how to earn a guinea.”
Violet looked up and smiled, and popped her rose gently into the water glass beside her, and went on adjusting her flowers.
“Wives, indeed! Yes—just what his poor father did before him, and his grandfather, old Sir Everard, he was married, privately, at twenty! It runs in the blood, my dear, like gaming or drinking: and the next I shall hear of William, I dare say, will be a note to ask my blessing on his marriage!”
Again Miss Violet laughed softly, and smiling for a moment, with a pretty slip of verbena in her fingers, she added it to the growing bouquet in the glass.
“You may laugh, my dear, but it is what I’m afraid of. I assure you I am serious.”