"That fool of a man," he said, in a suppressed tone, "evidently would not know a rose from a peony. I told him to take those figs to the young lady with the blue forget-me-nots in her white bonnet, and he took them to your neighbour with the unconscionably large china-asters. You must oblige me by taking one. They come out of my father's hot-house. I had them picked on purpose to send to Silverton, as I remembered hearing you say they were your favourite fruit; but Lady Dorington happened to call, and carried them off for this affair of to-day."
Mary turned her head, and lifted up her face towards the speaker. A look met hers from the dark eyes of Eugene Trevor—a look surely possessed of deeper meaning—which must have been intended to plead a greater boon than her acceptance of the fruit of his father's garden. And though the next moment he was gone, and she left with a beating heart to taste the luscious offering—nay, though he was scarcely many minutes by her side again that afternoon—for dancing quickly succeeded the repast, and Trevor did not dance, while Mary's hand was in great request—yet a feeling of such perfect happiness had suddenly taken possession of her soul, that she was fully contented to feel that, as he stood apart amongst those not joining in the dance, Trevor's eye was constantly following her every movement with earnest, never-diverted attention.
How strange the secret power which sometimes attracts one towards the other, two beings of natures the most opposite!
Perhaps if two individuals had been chosen from amongst that large assembly, by those who knew them best—who on the score of incompatibility were least calculated to blend harmoniously together—it would have been that pure-hearted, single-minded, high-souled girl, whose ideal standard of the good and beautiful was of so refined and elevated a nature, a standard hitherto kept intact by the peculiar circumstances of her youthful existence—from whose very outward aspect seemed to breathe the undisturbed harmony of her lovely character;—she and that man, of a corrupted and corrupting world, upon whose brow was set the mark of many a contracting aim, many a darkening thought, a debasing pursuit, upon whose soul lay perhaps as dark a stain of actual crime as any in that company;—yet it seemed that this mysterious unaccountable power, did from the very first draw their hearts with sympathetic unison one towards another.
Well it showed at least that Trevor's soul was not as yet "all evil," that it could still bow before an image of purity and goodness, such as was enshrined in Mary's breast, and she—
"Why did she love him?—
Curious fool be still—
Is human love the growth of human will?"
Absorbed in her happy dreams, Mary drove home that evening with her cousins, too happy, even, to be much disturbed by that generally most fruitful source of disturbance, the bitter words passing between her companions.
They seemed now to have been provoked by some imprudence of Mrs. de Burgh's during that day; her husband's animadversions thereupon exciting the lady's scornful resentment; but its exact nature, Mary had too little observed Mrs. de Burgh during the day, to be able fully to understand.
Mrs. de Burgh, on her part, had been too much occupied with her own pleasure and interests to attend much to Mary and her concerns; but she told her, as they parted for the night, that she expected Eugene the next day to dinner.
Mary also had received information to the same effect, communicated in her ear, as she was being handed to the carriage.