“Come, young ladies,” exclaimed Mr. Monckton, as he crossed the threshold of the bay window, “will you honour me with your company to the gates?”
The two girls rose and went out on to the lawn with the lawyer. Laura Mason was accustomed to obey her guardian, and Eleanor was very well pleased to pay all possible respect to Gilbert Monckton. She looked up to him as something removed from the commonplace sphere in which she felt so fettered and helpless. She fancied sometimes that if she could have told him the story of her father’s death, he might have helped her to find the old man’s destroyer. She had that implicit confidence in his power which a young and inexperienced woman almost always feels for a man of superior intellect who is twenty years her senior.
Mr. Monckton and the two girls walked slowly across the grass; but Laura Mason was distracted by her dogs before she reached the gate, and ran away into one of the shrubberied pathways after the refractory Italian greyhound.
The lawyer stopped at the gate. He was silent for some moments, looking thoughtfully at Eleanor, as if he had something particular to say to her.
“Well, Miss Vincent, how do you like Mr. Launcelot Darrell?” he asked at last.
The question seemed rather insignificant after the pause that had preceded it.
Eleanor hesitated.
“I scarcely know whether I like or dislike him,” she said; “he only came the night before last, and——”
“And my question is what we call a leading one. Never mind, you shall tell me what you think by-and-by, when you have had more time to form an opinion. You think the young man handsome, I suppose?”
“Oh, yes! very handsome.”