“I’m afraid, Mr. Herbert, like most of us, young as you are, you have your troubles. You will excuse an old woman, old enough to be your mother, and who likes you, who really feels a very deep interest in you, for saying so. I wish—I wish, in fact, there was a little more confidence, but all in good time. I said you were—you were—it’s perhaps impertinent of me to say I observed it, but my motive is not curiosity, nor, you will believe, unkind. I did see you were distressed this morning by the letter that reached you. I trust there was no illness, nor⸺”
“No, nothing—that is, which I had not—which was not,” he replied. “Nothing very unexpected.”
“For if there was any necessity, any wish to leave Kincton for a little, I should offer my poor services as a substitute with your pupil, if you would trust him to me.”
Although her graciousness was oppressive, and her playfulness awful, there were welcome signs of sympathy in this speech, and William Maubray greeted them with something like confidence, and, said he:—
“It’s awfully kind of you, Mrs. Kincton Knox, to think about me. I—I don’t know exactly what to say, except that I am very grateful, and—and it’s quite true, I’ve had a great deal of vexation and suffering—a kind of quarrel—a very bad quarrel, indeed, at home, as I call it, and—and some other things.”
“Other things!—no doubt. There is one trouble to which the young are exposed, and from which old people are quite exempt. The course of true love, you know, as our great moralist says, never did run smooth.”
Her prominent eyes were fixed with an awful archness upon Maubray, and conscious as he was, he blushed and paled under her gaze, and was dumb.
“My maxim in all such cases is, never despair. When a young man is endowed, like you, with good looks, and refinement. You see I am talking to you almost as I would to a son, that darling boy of mine is such a link, and one grows so soon to know a guest, and those delightful evenings, and I think—I think, Mr. Herbert, I can see a little with my old eyes, and I’ve divined your secret.”
“I may—that is, I think it may have been—a fancy, just. I don’t know,” said William, very much put out.
“But I know. You may be perfectly certain you are in love, if you aint quite certain that you are not. Trust an old woman who has seen something of life—that is, of human nature,” insisted Mrs. Kincton Knox.