“There is no need of your going for her. People of her class can always find their way,” his aunt had said to him in the morning, when he asked what time she expected her Yankee school-ma’am to arrive, saying he wished to know so as to have nothing in the way of his going up to meet her.
To his aunt’s suggestion that “people of her class could usually find their way,” he gave one of his pet whistles, and said,
“How do you know she is one of the ‘people of her class?’ And supposing she is, she is a woman, and young and possibly good looking, and New York is an awful place for a young, good-looking woman to land in, an entire stranger. So, ma chère auntie, I shall meet her just as I should want some chap of a Guy Seymour to meet my sister if I had one. And, auntie, I beg of you to unbend a little, and try to make her feel at home. I’ve no doubt she’ll be as homesick as I was the first time I ever visited you when I was a boy, and cried so hard to go home that I vomited up that quart of green gooseberries I had eaten surreptitiously out in the garden. Do you remember it?
And so kind-hearted Guy had his way, and when he told Magdalen that his aunt had kept him in a constant worry on her account, he had reference to a widely different state of affairs from what his words implied and what he meant they should imply. He had been fighting for her all day and insisting that if she was a lady she should be treated as a lady, and when he met her at the depot, he felt that he had been wholly right in the course he had pursued.
She was a lady, and pretty, too, as nearly as he could judge through the drab veil which covered her face. The veil was off when she came out to dinner, and Guy, who met her at the door and conducted her to the table, started a little to see how beautiful and graceful she was, and how like a queen she bore herself toward his aunt, who took her in now, from her black, shining hair to the sweep and cut of her fashionable travelling dress.
“That is last spring’s style. It must have been made in New York,” was Mrs. Seymour’s mental comment, and she felt a growing respect for one whose dress bore so unmistakably the New York stamp upon it.
She was dressed in satin,—soft, French gray satin,—whose heavy folds stood out from her slender figure and covered up the absence of hoops, which she never wore. There was a point lace coiffure on her head and point lace at her throat and wrists, and diamonds on her fat white hands, and she looked to the full a lady of the high position and blood which she professed, and she was very kind to Magdalen, albeit there was a certain stiffness in her manner which would have precluded the slightest approach to anything like familiarity had Magdalen attempted it.
Evidently there was something about Magdalen which riveted her attention, for she omitted no opportunity for looking at her when Magdalen did not know it, and at certain turns of the head and flashes of the large, restless eyes which sometimes met hers so suddenly, she found herself perplexed and bewildered, and wondering when or where she had seen eyes like these whose glance she did not like to meet, but which nevertheless kept flashing upon her, and then turning quickly away. Guy, too, caught now and then a familiar likeness to something seen before; but it was not in the eyes or the turn of the head,—it was more in the expression of the mouth and the smile which made Magdalen so beautiful, while there was something in the tone of her voice like another voice which in all the world made the sweetest music for him. He knew of whom Magdalen reminded him, though the faces of the two were no more alike than a brilliant rose and a fair, white water-lily. Still the sight of Magdalen and the silvery ring of her voice brought the absent one very near to him, and made him still kinder and more attentive to the young girl whose champion he had undertaken to be.
“Is it still your intention to leave New York to-morrow, or will you give Miss Lennox a day in the city for sight-seeing? I dare say she would like it better than plunging at once into that solitude of rocks and hills and running rills,” Guy said to his aunt, who replied: “I had intended to leave to-morrow. I am beginning to long for the solitude, as you call it, and unless Miss Lennox is very anxious to see the city—”
“Of course she is. Every young girl wants to see the Park and Broadway and the picture galleries, especially if she has never been in New York before. But I beg your pardon, Miss Lennox; for aught I know you were born here.”