The young lady smiled and shrugged plaintively at William, who said, “Howard, I shall tell your mamma, if you are rude to Miss Knox, and I’ll ask her not to take you out to-day.”
“That’s just it,” retorted Master Howard. “That’s the way you men always take her part against me, because you think she’s young and pretty. Ah-ha! I wish you’d ask her maid—Winter.”
“Be quiet, Sir,” said William, in so stern a tone, and with so angry a flash of his blue eyes, that the young gentleman was actually overawed, and returned lowering and muttering to the ship he had been rigging, only making an ugly grimace over his shoulder, and uttering the word “crocodile!”
Though Miss Clara smiled plaintively down upon the copy of Tennyson which lay open on the table, and turned over a page or two with her finger-tip, serenely, she inwardly quaked while Howard declaimed, and in her soul wished him the fate of Cicero; and when she got to her room planted her chair before the cheval glass with a crash, and exclaimed, “I do believe that the fiendish imp is raised up expressly to torture me! Other parents would beat such a brat into a mummy, and knock his head off rather than their daughter should be degraded by him; but mine seem to like it positively. I wish—oh! don’t I, just!” And the aposiopesis and the look were eloquent.
But she had not yet left the school-room, and as she looked down on the open pages, she murmured, sadly, “The Lord of Burleigh!” And looking up she said to William, “I see you read my poet and my favourite poem, too, only I think it too heart-rending. I can’t read it. I lose my spirits for the whole day after, and I wonder whether the story is really true,” she paused with a look of sad inquiry, and William answered that he had read it was so.
And she said, with a little sigh, “That only makes it sadder,” and she seemed to have something more to say, but did not; and after a moment, with a little smile and a nod, she went from the room. And William thought he had never seen her look so handsome, and had not before suspected her of so much mind and so much feeling, and he took the book up and read the poem through, and dreamed over it till the servant came with a knock at the door, and his mistress’s compliments, to know if Master Howard might go now.
CHAPTER XXXI.
A FRIEND APPEARS