“It is not charitable to say so, Marion; and I am sure one could not expect that Sir Francis would give her a dowry, when her husband was so wealthy.”
“So the girl never knew her real father? Well, doubtless it was better so; doubtless he would have wished it so himself, if he retained any unselfish and noble feelings—as you, my dear child, have been charitable enough to imagine may have been the case. And perhaps Perdita’s lot was the one best suited to her—she being as you have described her. For my part, having once had a child of my own, I may hope that she is happy—and that she deserves to be.” Mr. Grant uttered all this in a musing tone, as though his mind was dwelling upon other things than those immediately under discussion; but there was much grave tenderness in the sort of benediction with which he concluded. It made Marion’s heart go out toward him. She felt sure that he had known some deep love, and grievous sorrow, in his day. Now he was a lonely old man, but she resolved to be in the place of a daughter to him. She leaned her cheek upon her hand, and fell into a revery, in the midst of which the clock struck eleven.
“Bless me! how late we are keeping you up, Mrs. Lockhart,” exclaimed Mr. Grant, shutting up his snuff-box and putting it in his pocket. “The truth is, I have been so long deprived of ladies’ society, that now I am prone to presume too much on my good fortune. In future, you must help me to keep myself within bounds. Good-night, madam—I am your most obedient servant. Good-night, my dear Miss Marion; your father must have been a good man; I wish I might have known him. Mr. Lancaster, do you go with me?” The old gentleman was always thus ceremonious in his leave-takings.
“Yes, I’m with you,” said Lancaster, breaking out of a brown study into which he had subsided, and getting briskly to his feet. “I have to thank you for a strange story—an interesting one, I mean.”
“Is there so much in it?” said Marion, as she gave him her hand.
“I fancy I see a good deal in it,” answered he; adding with a smile, “but then, you know, I call myself a poet!”
The ladies courtseyed; the gentlemen bowed, and went up-stairs together.
CHAPTER X.
WHEN Philip Lancaster and Mr. Grant reached the landing at the head of the stairs, they faced each other for a moment; and then, by mutual impulse as it were, Grant tacitly extended, and Philip as tacitly accepted, an invitation to enter the former’s room. The mind resembles the heart in this, that it sometimes feels an instinctive and unexplained desire for the society of another mind. Cold and self-sufficient though the intellect is, it cannot always endure solitude and the corrosion of its unimparted thoughts. Therefore some of the most permanent, though not the most ardent friendships have been between men whose ground of meeting was exclusively intellectual. But men, for some reason, are not willing to admit this, and generally disguise the fact by a plausible obtrusion of other motives. So Mr. Grant, as he opened the door (after the tacit transaction abovementioned), said, “Step in, Lancaster, and help me through with a glass of that French cognac and water.”
“Thank you, I will,” Lancaster replied.