Miss Granger had no time to enlarge farther upon her manifold improvements before dinner, to which she was escorted by one of the officers from Steepleton, the nearest garrison town, who happened to be dining there that day, and was very glad to get an innings with the great heiress. The master of Arden Court had the honour of escorting Lady Laura; but from his post by the head of the long table he looked more than once to that remote spot where Clarissa sat, not far from his daughter. My lady saw those curious glances, and was delighted to see them. They might mean nothing, of course; but to that sanguine spirit they seemed an augury of success for the scheme which had been for a long time hatching in the matron's busy brain.
"What do you think of my pet, Mr. Granger?" she asked presently.
Mr. Granger glanced at the ground near my lady's chair with rather a puzzled look, half expecting to see a Maltese spaniel or a flossy-haired Skye terrier standing on its hind legs.
"What do you think of my pet and protégée, Miss Lovel?"
"Miss Lovel! Well, upon my word, Lady Laura, I am so poor a judge of the merits of young ladies in a general way; but she really appears a very amiable young person."
"And is she not lovely?" asked Lady Laura, contemplating the distant Clarissa in a dreamy way through her double eye-glass. "I think it is the sweetest face I ever saw."
"She is certainly very pretty," admitted Mr. Granger. "I was struck by her appearance this afternoon in the library. I suppose there is something really out of the common in her face, for I am generally the most unobservant of men in such matters."
"Out of the common!" exclaimed Lady Laura. "My dear sir, it is such a face as you do not see twice in a lifetime. Madame Recamier must have been something like that, I should fancy—a woman who could attract the eyes of all the people in the great court of the Luxembourg, and divide public attention with Napoleon."
Mr. Granger did not seem interested in the rather abstract question of
Clarissa's possible likeness to Madame Recamier.
"She is certainly very pretty," he repeated in a meditative manner; and stared so long and vacantly at a fricandeau which a footman was just offering him, that any less well-trained attendant must have left him in embarrassment.