"Who is it that you would like?" asked the justice, tartly.
"I should like nobody in that capacity. I might put up with it; but that is very different from liking."
"For my own part, if we decide upon a companion, there's no one I would so soon have as Lady Ellis," remarked Mr. Thornycroft. "Would you?"
"La la, la la!" sang Mary Anne, her eyes following a passing bird.
"Answer me without further trifling," sternly resumed Mr. Thornycroft, putting his hand on her shoulder.
The tone sobered her. "Of course, papa; if some one must come, why, let it be Lady Ellis."
Heaving a sort of relieved sigh, he released her, and she went away singing to herself a scrap of a pretty little French song, the refrain of which was, rendered in English--"If you come today, madam, you go tomorrow."
The misapprehension that arises in this world! None of us are perfectly open one with the other. Between the husband and the wife, the parents and the children, the brothers and the sisters, involuntary deceit reigns. Mr. Thornycroft assumed that Lady Ellis would be more acceptable to his daughter as a resident at the Red Court than any one else that could be found: had Miss Thornycroft spoken the truth boldly, she would have said that my Lady Ellis was her bête noire; the person she most disliked of all others on earth.
But the chief question was not solved yet in the mind of Justice Thornycroft. Should it be wife, or should it be only companion? He was quite sufficiently taken with my lady's fascinations to render the first alternative sufficiently agreeable in prospective; he deemed her a soft-hearted, yielding gentlewoman; he repeated over again to himself the mysterious words, "As a wife she would be less dangerous than a companion." But still, there were considerations against it that made him hesitate. And with good cause.
He went strolling towards the village, turning down the waste land, a right of way that was his own, past the plateau. The first house, at the corner of the street, was the Mermaid. He passed the end of it, and struck across to a low commodious cottage on the cliffs, whose rooms were all on the ground-floor. Tomlett lived in it; he was called the fishing-boat master, and was also employed occasionally on the farm of Mr. Thornycroft, as he had leisure. Mrs. Tomlett, a little woman with a red face and shrill voice, was hanging out linen on the lines to dry.