She admired without a pang of envy. She had taken her surroundings for granted a long time ago; and so long as her father was able to pacify his creditors by occasional payments, and so long as rates and taxes got themselves settled without desperate measures, Eve Marchant was at peace with destiny.
While her senses of sight and scent were absorbing the beauty and perfume of the room, Mrs. Vansittart came in from a walk with the nurse and baby, and her son made haste to introduce his sister’s guest.
“Mother, this is Miss Marchant,” he said briefly, and Eve rose blushing to acknowledge the elder woman’s greeting.
He would not commit himself, forsooth. Why, in the look he gave her as she rose shyly to take his mother’s hand, in the tenderness of his tone as he spoke her name, he was committing himself almost as deeply as if he had said outright, “Mother, this is the woman I love, and I want you to love her.”
Mrs. Vansittart, prejudiced by much that she had heard of the Marchant household, could but acknowledge to herself that the Colonel’s eldest daughter was passing fair, and that this sensitive countenance in which the bloom came and went at a breath, had as candid and innocent an outlook as even a mother’s searching eye could desire in the countenance of her son’s beloved. But then, unhappily, Mrs. Vansittart had seen enough of the world and its ways to know that appearances are deceitful, and that many a blushing bride whose drooping head and gentle bashfulness suggested the innocence that might ride on lions and not be afraid, has afterwards made a shameful figure in the Divorce Court.
CHAPTER VII.
HE WOULD TAKE HIS TIME.
The luncheon at Redwold Towers was a very sociable meal. Lady Hartley was at all times a gracious hostess, and she was perhaps a little more attentive to Colonel Marchant’s daughters than she would have been to guests of more assured position.
The meal was abundant, and served with the quiet undemonstrative luxury which steals over the senses like the atmosphere of the Lotos Island, with its suggestion of a world in which there is neither labour nor care, no half-empty mustard-pots, or stale bread, or flat beer, or unreplenished pickle-jars.
There was plenty of game, and there were those appetising kickshaws, Russian salads, and such-like, which Vansittart had bargained for, and cold and hot sweets in profusion. Hetty and Peggy eat enormously, urged thereto by Mr. Tivett, who sat between them; but Eve had no more appetite than might have been expected in a sensitive girl who finds herself suddenly in a new atmosphere—an atmosphere of unspoken love, which wraps her round like a perfume. Vansittart remonstrated with her for eating so little after a long walk and a morning on the ice; but she could but see that he eat very little himself, and that all his time and thoughts were given to her.