He began telling his hostess whence he came and what was his business. A quarry which a dead relative had bequeathed to him had had sufficient attraction to bring him across the sea and across this railless region. His few words of self-introduction were mingled with and followed by regrets for his intrusion, expressions of excessive gratitude. All the time his mind was questioning amazedly.
By the time the speeches which he deemed necessary were finished, he had followed the girl into a spacious room, furnished in the large gay style of the fifties, brilliantly lit, as if for a festival, and warmed by a log fire of generous dimensions. Having led him in, listening silently the while, and put her additional lamp upon the table, she now spoke, with no empressement, almost with a manner of insouciance.
'You are perfectly welcome; my father would never have wished his house to be inhospitable.'
With her words his own apologies seemed to lose their significance; he felt a little foolish, and she, with some slight evidence of childish awkwardness, seemed to seek a pretext for short escape.
'I will tell my sister.' These words came with more abruptness, as if the interior excitement was working itself to the surface.
The room was a long one. She went out by a door at the farther end, and, as with intense curiosity he watched her quickly receding form, he noticed that when she thought herself out of his sight she entered the other room with a skip. At that same end of the room hung a full-length portrait of a gentleman. It was natural that Courthope should walk towards it, trying to become acquainted with some link in the train of circumstances which had raised this enchanted palace in the wilderness; he had not followed to hear, but he overheard.
'Eliz, it's a real young man!'
'No! you are only making up, and' (here a touch of querulousness) 'I've often told you that I don't like make-ups that one wants too much to be true. I'll only have the Austens and Sir Charles and Evelina and——'
'Eliz! He's not a make-up; the fairies have sent him to our party. Isn't it just fairilly entrancing? He has a curly moustache and a nice nose. He's English, like father. He says "cawn't," and "shawn't," and "heah," and "theyah,"—genuine, no affectation. Oh' (here came a little gurgle of joy), 'and to-night, too! It's the first perfectly joyful thing that has ever come to us.'
Courthope moved quietly back and stood before the blazing logs, looking down into them with a smile of pure pleasure upon his lips.