“And your cousin—isn’t she?—down there, how awfully pretty she is,” said Trevor, at last, lowering his cigar between his fingers.
“Cousin? I suppose we’re all cousins in some roundabout way related—I don’t know how. Yes, she is—she’s very pretty.”
“Darkwell: connected, are they, with the Darkwells of Shropshire?” asked Trevor.
“Perhaps—I really don’t know—I never knew there were Darkwells in Shropshire,” said William.
“Oh, dear, yes! I thought everyone knew that. Darkwell’s the name of the place, too. A very old family,” said Trevor.
“I did not know; but her father is a barrister, and lives in London, and has some sons, but I never saw them,” answered William.
Trevor sighed. He was thinking what low fellows these sons might possibly be. A barrister. He remembered “young Boles’s” father visiting Rugby once, a barrister, making fifteen hundred a year, a shabby, lean-looking fellow, with a stoop, and a seedy black frock coat, and grizzled whiskers, who talked in a sharp, dry way, with sometimes a little brow-beating tendency—not a bit like a gentleman. On the other hand, to be sure, there were lots of swells among them; but still there was the image of old Boles’s father intruding into the moonlight, and poking about the old trees of Gilroyd. They had come to a halt under the mighty clump of beech trees that you can see against the sky from the distant road to Audminton, and, after a silence, Trevor said—
“I remember a thing I saw in a play in London, about a fellow that married a mermaid, or something of the sort; and, egad, they got on capitally till their family began to appear, and—and the situation began to grow too, too fishy, in fact for him; so, by Jove, he cut and run, and I forget how the play ends; but it was awfully funny.”
“Yes,” said William, “they ought to come to us like Aphrodite, from the foam of the sea, and have no kindred—in utter isolation.”
“Who?” asked Trevor.