Lilla raised her eyes to heaven with a most edifying expression of pious horror, and shook her head disapprovingly.
"Jack," muttered Bluebell, in a tone of concentrated anguish, "I shall die of it!"
Vavasour suppressed an expletive more forcible than parliamentary, and strode down to pull the boat in.
"Oh, here you are," cried Cecil, innocent of the foregoing pantomime, for she was rowing, and had her back to them. "Mr. Vavasour, where do you spring from?" She noted, as she spoke, his strange expression and Bluebell's heightened colour with quickening curiosity and pleasure.
"I left Fane further down the river," said he; "and Miss Leigh and I sat listening to the—bull-frogs." Here Jack cast a look half-imploring, half-furious, at Lilla, who had assumed a most Quakerish expression, and hummed the air, "A frog he would a wooing go."
"Well, get in Bluebell," said Cecil, smiling; "we are going home now. Come and see us soon, Mr. Vavasour."
Jack liked Cecil very much; but he only bowed gloomily, and placing Bluebell in her canoe, disappeared, as might be inferred, to Fane; though afterwards that gentleman bitterly complained that he had, on returning home,—after waiting, to his great inconvenience, an hour or more, anathematizing Jack,—found that he had walked back to barracks totally oblivious of his companion.
Bluebell's return drive was far from a peaceful one. Lilla, it is true, abstained from remarks before the children; but there was no escaping her provokingly wicked glances, which argued ill for her future discretion.
Cecil, on the contrary, was unusually suave and considerate to Bluebell, and had rather the air of shielding her from Lilla; which would have been less incomprehensible had she known that in the interval of disembarking and entering the waggonette, Cecil had been made a participator in that malicious damsel's discovery.
At bed-time, Miss Rolleston, contrary to her wont, entered Bluebell's room, hair-brush in hand, as if disposed for a cozy confab. But that employment, so provocative of feminine disclosures, appeared futile this night, and the raven and chestnut coils were brushed to the sheen of a bird's wing ere Cecil had discovered what she had come for.