“Well,” with a sigh, “I believe she will come through the ordeal, and that I am destined to have her for my sister.”
“You have made her love you already. That leaves less work for you in the future.”
“Poor mother! She will be woefully disappointed.”
“True,” said Vansittart; “but as I couldn’t marry all her protégées, perhaps it is just as well I should marry none of them; and be assured I should not love Eve Marchant if I didn’t believe that she would be a good and loving daughter to my mother.”
“Every lover believes as much. It is all nonsense,” said Maud, as she ran off to her dressing-room.
Mr. Sefton made an early appearance at Lady Hartley’s afternoon. He arrived before the Marchants, and when there were only about a dozen people in the long drawing-room, and Vansittart guessed by the way he loitered near a window overlooking the drive that he was on the watch for the sisters.
Lady Hartley introduced her brother to Mr. Sefton, with the respect due to the owner of one of the finest estates in the county, a man of old family and aristocratic connections. Sefton was particularly cordial, and began to make conversation in the most amiable way, a man not renowned for amiability to his equals. The Miss Marchants were announced while he and Vansittart were talking, and Sefton’s attention began to wander immediately, although he continued the discussion of hopes and fears about that by-election which was disturbing every politician’s mind; or which at any rate served as a topic among people who had nothing to say to each other.
Only two out of the three grown-up sisters appeared, Eve and Jenny. The more diplomatic Sophy thought she improved her social status by occasional absence.
Sefton broke away from the conversation at the first opening, and went straight to Eve, who was talking to little Mr. Tivett, arrived that afternoon, no holidays being complete in a country house without such a man as Tivett, with his little thin voice, good nature, and willing to fetch and carry for the weaker sex.
Vansittart stood aloof for a little while, talking to a comfortable matron, who was evidently attached to the landed interest, as her conversation dwelt upon the weather in its relation to agriculture and the lambing season. He could see that Eve received Sefton’s advances with coldest politeness. On her part there was no touch of the earnest and confidential air which had so distressed him that afternoon by the lake. She talked with Sefton for a few minutes, and then turned away, and walked into the adjoining room, where the wide French window stood open to the garden. Vansittart seized his opportunity and followed her. He found her with her sister, looking at a pile of new books on a large table in a corner, and he speedily persuaded them that the flower-beds outside were better worth looking at than magazines and books which were no less ephemeral than the tulips and hyacinths.