“I can try and find out, my dear,” he said, after a pause, “that’s open to anybody. The Princess Alice! She’s one of Ward’s ships, I think. If the shipbrokers are inclined to be civil, they’ll perhaps help me; but I have no justification for bothering them upon the subject, and they may tell me to go about my business. If I could give them a good reason for my making such an inquiry, I might very likely find them willing to help me. But what can I tell them—except that a very beautiful young person with grey eyes and auburn hair has taken an absurd crotchet into her obstinate head, and that I, her faithful slave, am compelled to do her bidding?”
“Never mind what they say to you, Richard,” Miss Vane replied, authoritatively; “they must answer your question if you only go on asking them long enough.”
Mr. Thornton smiled.
“That’s the true feminine method of obtaining information; isn’t it, Nell?” he said. “However, I’ll do my best: and if the shipbrokers are to be ‘got at,’ as sporting gentlemen say, it shall go hard if I don’t get a list of the passengers who sailed in the Princess Alice.”
“Dear, dear Dick!” cried Eleanor, holding out both her hands to her champion. The young man sighed. Alas! he knew only too well that all this pretty friendliness was as far away from any latent tenderness or hidden emotion as the blusterous frozen North is from the splendid sunny South.
“I wonder whether she knows what love is,” thought the scene-painter; “I wonder whether her heart has been touched ever so slightly by the fatal emotion. No; she is a bright virginal creature, all confidence and candour, and she has yet to learn the mysteries of life. I wish I could think less of her; and fall in love with Miss Montalembert—her name is plain Lambert, and she has added the Monta for the sake of euphony. I wish I could fall in love with Lizzie Lambert, popularly known as Elise Montalembert, the soubrette at the Phœnix. She is a good little girl, and earns a salary of four pounds a week. She’s fond of the Signora, too, and we could leave the Pilasters and go into housekeeping upon our joint salaries.”
Mr. Thornton’s fancies might have rambled on in this wise for some time, but he was abruptly aroused from his reverie by Eleanor Vane, who had been watching him rather impatiently.
“When are you going to the shipbroker’s, Dick?” she asked.
“When am I going?”
“Yes; you’ll go at once, won’t you?”