"A very pleasant ball," remarked Mr. Granger, with the air of saying something original. "You have been dancing, I suppose?"
"No," replied Mr. Fairfax, smiling; "I have come into my property. I don't dance. 'I range myself,' as our friends here say."
He thought, as he spoke, of sundry breakneck gallops and mahlstrom waltzes danced in gardens and saloons, the very existence whereof was ignored by or unknown to respectability; and then thought, "If I were safely planted on the other side of the world with her for my wife, it would cost me no more to cut all that kind of thing than it would to throw away a handful of withered flowers."
* * * * *
CHAPTER XXXVII.
STOLEN HOURS.
Miss Granger's portrait was finished; and the baby picture—a chubby blue-eyed cherub, at play on a bank of primroses, with a yellowhammer perched on a blossoming blackthorn above his head, and just a glimpse of blue April sky beyond; a dainty little study of colour in which the painter had surpassed himself—was making rapid progress, to the young mother's intense delight. Very soon Mr. Austin would have no longer the privilege of coming every other day to the Rue de Morny. Daniel Granger had declined sitting for his portrait.
"I did it once," he said. "The Bradford people insisted upon making me a present of my own likeness, life-size, with my brown cob, Peter Pindar, standing beside me. I was obliged to hang the picture in the hall at Arden—those good fellows would have been wounded if I hadn't given it a prominent position; but that great shining brown cob plays the mischief with my finest Velasquez, a portrait of Don Carlos Baltazar, in white satin slashed with crimson. No; I like your easy, dashing style very much, Mr. Austin; but one portrait in a lifetime is quite enough for me."
As the Granger family became more acclimatised, as it were, Clarissa found herself with more time at her disposal. Sophia had attached herself to a little clique of English ladies, and had her own engagements and her separate interests. Clarissa's friends were for the most part Frenchwomen, whom she had known in London, or to whom she had been introduced by Lady Laura. Mr. Granger had his own set, and spent his afternoons agreeably enough, drinking soda water, reading Galignani, and talking commerce or politics with his compeers at the most respectable café on the Boulevards. Being free therefore to dispose of her afternoons, Clarissa, when Lovel's picture was finished, went naturally to the Rue du Chevalier Bayard. Having once taken her servants there, she had no farther scruples. "They will think I come to see a dressmaker," she said to herself. But in this she did not give those domestic officers credit for the sharpness of their class. Before she had been three times to her brother's lodgings, John Thomas, the footman, had contrived—despite his utter ignorance of the French tongue—to discover who were the occupants of No. 7, and had ascertained that Mr. Austin, the painter, was one of them.
"Who'd have thought of her coming to see that chap Hostin?" said John
Thomas to the coachman. "That's a rum start, ain't it?"