Long after she left he paced the room; then he lit his candle and prepared to go to bed also. There was a smile upon his face, which lingered till he was fairly in bed. Then he murmured something to himself, "I am glad it is Margaret," he said, and turned round and went to sleep.
In the meantime the girls were happy, though Grace was a little restless. To go out walking, to meet two or three people, to eat and drink and sleep, was not enough for her; she wanted something more, she had a perfect craving for excitement. This was not the life she had dreamed of. But for Paul Lyons it would be worse, but between her and Paul had arisen a kind of perpetual give-and-take in words which satisfied her since it occupied all his time. Margaret was nowhere as regarded this, and Grace was happy in having the one cavalier within reach entirely at her service.
Indeed, Margaret, with the unnecessary frankness of a girl, piqued him by her open and undisguised sentiments of not only indifference, but dislike.
There is an instinct in unspoiled girlhood which is often an unerring guide. Margaret disliked Paul Lyons from the first; the ready change of tone, the slighting observations at every moment about Mrs. Dorriman's tastes, which Grace thought so natural and so witty, displeased her. She thought him worse than he was. His manner to his mother was so careless, and he so openly scoffed at her views, that she did not give him credit for the hours he spent beside her when she was ill, or for the affection he had for her. She thought him hateful. She had a high idea of what a man should be, and her limited experience had not been happy. One great relief was the fact that, save and except that one meeting on the steps of the hotel, Mr. Drayton remained invisible. Indeed when they met in this spasmodic and unpremeditated way he was waiting for a steamer to take him many miles in another direction, and had gone, determined, however, to return at the earliest possible opportunity.
After the conversation with his mother, Paul began to take much greater pains to recommend himself to Margaret. He was like most of us—attracted towards her by seeing her what he would wish to be. She had so much of what he lacked. She was quiet, reserved, singularly fearless on those rare occasions of asserting herself, and so openly disapproved when he said or did anything giving the lie to his professions, that he caught himself feeling ashamed of himself. Under the gaze of her pure and unclouded eyes he felt unworthy, and she awoke in him the desire for something better. He began to look back with disgust and weariness on the portions of his life when he had fancied he had seen life and lived; a better and truer manliness became visible to him.
She was much younger, but so much wiser, he thought; he, by degrees, fell from profound admiration into despair, and then rebounded from despair to hope as she was kind to him, and found himself hopelessly in love, before he well knew what he was about.
The sincerity of his love was proved by its real humility. What had he to offer this young brave who had talked so glibly about throwing his handkerchief? When his mother prattled to him of his perfections he felt bitterly humiliated. The serene grace of Margaret's manner, the limitless indifference as to his presence or his coming or going, was a terrible mortification to him, and he could go nowhere for consolation. His mother's sole idea of consolation he knew would be flattery, and he had learned to hate it.
Margaret's intense devotion to her sister was to him something beautiful and wonderful, though he could not at times resist enlightening her about her own superiority, only to regret it since his doing so made Margaret cold to him and angry with him.
"You make an idol of your sister," he said to her, one day; "you think her so beautiful. You are much more fair, and far, far more lovely."
"You should not say these things even to me," said Margaret, seriously, "though I know you cannot help trying to flatter me—it is your way of making conversation, I think."