"I assure you, I can't blame him. I don't wonder. I think a great deal has been very wantonly done to aggravate his misfortunes; but surely, he can't fancy that I could sympathise with any such proceedings, or feel anything but horror and disgust. Surely, you would not allow him to connect me, however slightly? I know you would not."
"My dear Mr. Verney, you don't know Booth Fanshawe, or rather, you do, I believe, know him a great deal too well, to fancy that I could venture to speak to him upon the subject. That, I assure you, is quite out of the question; and I may as well tell you frankly, if he were at home, I mean here, I should have begged you at once, inhospitable as it might seem, to leave this place, and trust to time and to letters, but here I would not have allowed you to linger."
"He's away from home, then!" exclaimed Cleve.
"Yes; but he'll be back to-night at ten o'clock."
"At ten o'clock," repeated Cleve, and the young man thought what a treasure of minutes there was in the interval. "And Miss Fanshawe—Margaret—she's quite well?"
"Yes, she's quite well," answered kind Miss Sheckleton, looking in his earnest eyes, and thinking that he looked a little thin and pale. "She's quite well, and, I hope, you have been."
"Oh, yes," answered the young man, "as well as a man with a good many troubles can be. In fact, I may tell you, I've been very unhappy. I was thinking of writing to Sir Booth."
"Don't," implored Miss Sheckleton, looking quite wildly into his eyes, and with her hand upon his arm, as if to arrest the writing of that letter, "you have no notion how he feels. I assure you, an allusion—the slightest thing is quite enough to set him in a blaze. The other day, for instance, I did not know what it was, till I took up the paper he had been reading, and I found there something about the Verney peerage, and proof that Arthur Verney was dead, and your uncle to get it; and really I can't wonder—some people seem so unaccountably fortunate, and others, everything goes wrong with—even I felt vexed when I read it, though, of course, any good fortune happening to you, I should be very glad of. But he did not see any of us till next day—even Macklin."
"Yes, it is very true," said Cleve, "my uncle is dead, and we shall prove it, that is, my uncle Kiffyn will. But you are quite right to distinguish as you do. It involves nothing for me. Since it has come so near, I have lost all faith in it's ever reaching me. I have, I can't call it a conviction, but a superstition, that it never will. I must build my own fortunes from their foundations, with my own hand. There is but one success on earth that can make me very proud and very happy. Do you think, that having come all this way, in that hope, on that one chance, that Margaret will see me?"
"I wish you had written to me before coming," said Anne Sheckleton, after a little pause. "I should have liked to find out first, all I could, from herself; she is so odd. I've often told you that she is odd. I think it would have been wiser to write to me before coming over, and I should have talked to her,—that is, of course, if she had allowed me,—for I can't in the least say that she would even hear me on the subject."