Miss Clara made no sign by look, word or motion; and after a little pause her mamma went on sturdily.
“Yes, I ought, at my time of life, and having been I may say a good deal admired in my day, and married, and not quite as I might have been perhaps, but still pretty well. I ought to know something more of such matters than my daughter, I think, and I can’t be mistaken. I don’t say passion, I say a liking—a fancy, and that there is I’ll stake my life. If you only take the trouble to think you’ll see. I hold it quite impossible that a young man should be as he is, alone for several weeks in a country-house with a person, I will say, of your advantages and attractions without some such feeling, im—possible.”
Miss Kincton Knox looked indolently on her fair image in the mirror at the further end of the room.
“In those rides he and Howard have taken with you, I venture to say he has said things which I should have understood had I been by.”
“I told you he never said anything—anything particular—anything he might not have said to anyone else,” said the young lady, wearily. “He is evidently very shy, I allow.”
“Very! extremely shy,” acquiesced her mamma, eagerly; “and when all these things are considered, I don’t think in the time you could possibly have expected more.”
“I never expected anything,” said Miss Clara, with another weary sneer.
“Didn’t you? then I did,” answered the matron.
Miss Clara simply yawned.
“You are in one of your unfortunate tempers. Don’t you think, Miss Kincton Knox, even on the supposition that he is about leaving our house, that you may as well command your spirit of opposition and ill temper, which has uniformly defeated every endeavour of mine to—be of use to you, and here you are at eight-and-twenty.” The young lady looked round alarmed, but there was no listener, “and you seem to have learned nothing.”