“Ah, to be a boy again—to be a boy that I might dare to woo her for my own!” he sighed; and at length his passion drove him to Orange Grove, that he might see for himself how Cameron Bentley’s wooing sped.
He found Cameron, metaphorically, at her feet. She had other lovers, too, this dainty young ward of his. Half a score of young men staying at the house were ready to murder one another for her fair sake; but with wonderful cleverness she distributed her smiles impartially among them all, causing one jealous damsel to quote:
“Sister she’ll be to them all, and
Loving and faithful and true;
Rather inclined round her fingers to wind
About—say, a dozen or two.”
“I don’t think she means to flirt with anybody. See how she tries to be the same with all,” Nell Bentley replied, valiantly taking her favorite’s part; but she only got a shrug of the shoulders from the malicious New York belle.
Into this coterie of beauties and gallants Norman de Vere now intruded, and his fame, no less than his darkly handsome, melancholy face, secured for him the most flattering attention. But Miss Bentley at once took possession of him, and during his call—which was as long as conventionality would permit—he was not allowed so much as a minute’s quiet conversation with Thea. He spoke to her formally across the room, and had the pleasure of hearing that she was having a delightful time, and that the riding-lessons went on daily. Miss Bentley, who had long adored the handsome widower in secret, monopolized him entirely, and Cameron Bentley tried to do the same by Thea. So Norman went away disappointed, his chagrin hardly soothed by the fact that in spite of being “so old,” as he phrased it to himself, he had been lionized by the Bentleys and their guests and invited to come the next day. He could remember nothing very clearly, except that Thea had looked almost unpardonably young and happy, and that her dress of rich dark-green cashmere with plush trimmings was quite the most becoming he had ever seen her wear, setting off the gold of her hair till it seemed like living sunshine, and bringing out all the rose-leaf tints of her dazzling complexion at their best. She had not looked at him much, not daring to meet his eyes with the memory fresh in her mind of the verses she had been rash enough to permit him to read.
“No doubt he is laughing in his sleeve at me now. Of course they seemed wishy-washy trash to him,” she thought, ruefully; then a little later, jealously: “But he is not thinking of me. He is quite absorbed in Miss Bentley. She is handsome, and she likes him, I know. It was easy to find that out. What if it is a mutual affair?”
Her heart sunk, and the flushed cheeks grew a shade paler with fear.