Questioned thus, Clarissa was fain to give her friend some slight account of her day at Arden.
"It must have affected you very much to see the old place. Ah, Clary, it is you who ought to be mistress there, instead of Miss Granger!"
Clarissa blushed, remembering that awkward avowal of Daniel Granger's.
"I am not fit to be mistress of such, a place," she said. "I could never manage things as Miss Granger does."
"Not in that petty way, perhaps. I should not care to see you keeping accounts and prying into grocery-lists as she does. You would govern your house on a grander scale. I should like to see you the owner of a great house."
"That is a thing you are never likely to see, Lady Laura."
"I am not so sure of that. I have an idea that there is a great fortune lying at your feet, if you would only stoop to pick it up. But girls are so foolish; they never know what is really for their happiness; and if by any chance there should happen to be some passing folly, some fancy of the moment, to come between them and good fortune, everything is lost."
She looked at Clarissa closely as she said this. The girl's face had been changing from red to pale throughout the interview. She was very pale now, but quite self-possessed, and had left off blushing. Had she not given her promise—pledged away her freedom of action with regard to George Fairfax—and thus made an end of everything between them? She felt very calm, but she felt as if she had made a sacrifice. As for Daniel Granger, any reference to him and his admiration for her touched upon the regions of the absurd. Nothing—no friendly manoeuvring of Lady Laura's, no selfish desires of her father's—could ever induce her to listen for a moment to any proposition from that quarter.
She asked her visitor to go into the house presently, in order to put an end to the conversation; and Lady Laura went in to say a few words to Mr. Lovel. They were very melancholy words—all about the dead, and his innumerable virtues—which seemed really at this stage of his history to have been alloyed by no human frailty or shortcoming. Mr. Lovel was sympathetic to the last degree—sighed in unison with his visitor, and brushed some stray drops of moisture from his own eyelids when Lady Laura wept. And then he went out to the carriage with my lady, and saw her drive away, with the blinds discreetly lowered as before.
"What did she come about, Clarissa?" he asked his daughter, while they were going back to the house.