'I have not been frightened by the ghost—I am too modern to believe in ghosts.'
'Oh, but it is modern to believe in everything impossible—spirit-rapping, thought-reading.'
'Perhaps; but I am not of that temper.' And then, with a graver look than
Ida had ever seen in his face, he said, 'You are full of enthusiasm about
that old place among the hills, Ida. I hope you do not care more for the
Abbey than for me.'
She crimsoned and looked down. The question touched her weakness too nearly.
'Oh, no,' she faltered; 'what are cedars and limestone as compared with humanity?'
'And if I were without the Abbey—if the Abbey and I were nothing to each other—should I be nobody in your sight?'
'It is difficult to dissociate a man from his surroundings,' she answered; 'but I suppose you would be just the same person?'
'I hope so,' said Brian. '"The rank is but the guinea stamp, the man's a man for a' that." But the guinea stamp is an uncommonly good thing in its way, I admit.'
These afternoon promenades between four and five o'clock, while the rest of the school was out walking, had been going on for a fortnight, and no harm to Ida had come of her indiscretion. Perhaps she hardly considered how wrong a thing she was doing in violating Miss Pew's confidence by conduct so entirely averse from Miss Pew's ideas of good behaviour. The confidence had been so grudgingly given, Miss Pew had been so systematically unkind, that the girl may be forgiven for detesting her, nay, even for glorying in the notion of acting in a manner which would shock all Miss Pew's dearest prejudices. Her meeting with her lover could scarcely be called clandestine, for she took very little pains to conceal the fact. If the affair had gone on secretly for so long, it was because of no artifice on her part.
But that any act of any member of the Mauleverer household could remain long unknown was almost an impossibility. If there had been but one pair of eyes in the establishment, and those the eyes of Miss Pillby, the thing would have been discovered; for those pale unlovely orbs were as the eyes of Argus himself in their manifold power to spy out the proceedings of other people—more especially of any person whom their owner disliked.