The same crimson flush mounted almost as quickly to Laura’s pale cheeks and brow. Both stood looking at the ground, embarrassed as a schoolboy and girl, while the blackbirds whistled triumphantly in the shrubbery, and a thrush in the orchard went into ecstasies of melody.
Laura was the first to recover.
‘Have you been staying long at Hazlehurst?’ she asked, quietly.
‘I only came an hour ago. My first visit was to the Manor, though I expected to find it an empty house.’
Another picture now appeared in the green frame—a young lady with a neat little figure, a retroussé nose, and an agreeably vivacious countenance.
‘Come here, Celia,’ cried Laura, ‘and let me introduce Mr. Treverton. You have heard your father talk about him. Mr. Treverton, Miss Clare.’
Miss Clare bowed and smiled, and murmured something indefinite. ‘Poor Edward!’ she was thinking all the while. ‘This Mr. Treverton is awfully good-looking.’
‘Awfully’ was Miss Clare’s chief laudatory adjective; her superlative form of praise was ‘quite too awfully,’ and when enthusiasm carried her beyond herself she called things ‘nice.’ ‘Quite too awfully nice,’ was her maximum of rapture.
As she rarely left Hazlehurst Vicarage, and knew in all about twenty people, it is something to her credit that she had made herself mistress of the current metropolitan slang.
‘I suppose you are staying at the Sampsons?’ she said. ‘Mr. Sampson is always talking of you. “My friend Treverton,” he calls you, but I suppose you won’t mind that. It’s rather trying.’