"With a tinge of red in it," put in Emma Mowbray.
"Well; you must point him out to me," said Eleanor, and then hastened to change the conversation, for she had an instinctive dread of any sort of quarrelling, and disliked ill-nature. Emma Mowbray had not favourably impressed her: Rose had, in spite of her vanity and her random avowals. "You are in mourning, Miss Darling?"
"Yes, for my eldest sister's husband, Mr. Carleton St. John. But I have a new white bonnet, you see, though he has not been dead many weeks: and I don't care whether mamma finds it out or not. I told the milliner she need not specify in the bill whether the bonnet was white or black. Oh dear! where is Mademoiselle Clarisse?"
Mademoiselle Clarisse, the teacher who took them to church (and who took also a book hidden under her own arm to read surreptitiously during the sermon, not a word of which discourse could her French ears understand) came at last. As the school took its seats in the gallery of the church, the few who were in Rose's secret looked down with interest, for the gentleman in question was then coming up the middle aisle, accompanied by a lady and a little girl.
"There he is!" whispered Rose to Eleanor, next to whom she sat, and her voice was as one glow of exultation, and her cheeks flushed crimson. "Going into the pew below. There: he is handing in the little girl. Do you see?"
"Yes," replied Eleanor. "What of him?"
"It is he. He whom the girls tease me about, my fiancé, as they call him, I trust my future husband. That he loves me, I am positive."
Eleanor answered nothing. Her face was as red as Rose's just then; but Rose was too much occupied with something else to notice it. The gentleman--who was really a handsome young man--was looking up at the gallery, and a bright smile of recognition, meant for one of them, shone on his face. Rose naturally took it to herself.
"Did you see that? did you see that?" she whispered right and left. "Emma Mowbray, who took first notice now?"
The service began. At its conclusion Rose pushed unceremoniously out of the pew, and the rest followed her, in spite of precedent, for the schools waited until last; and in spite of Mademoiselle Clarisse. But, on the previous Sunday, Rose had been too late to see him: he had left the church. On this, as the event proved, she was too early, for he had not come out; and Mademoiselle Clarisse, who was in a terrible humour with them for their rudeness, marched them home at a quick pace.