“But why should seeing Geneviève in the garden have made him say so?” inquired Cicely.
“My dear, how can I tell? When people are in love, there is no accounting for what they will do. Geneviève may have been cold to him, or—he is a very modest young man—he may think we should not approve of it, and may have been afraid of being tempted to say something. Who can say? I only say that I feel sure he has got something of the kind in his head.”
Cicely looked grave. “Perhaps he has,” she replied. To herself she said, “I wonder why, if it is so, it should have made Geneviève so desperately cross.”—“Mamma,” she added, after a little silence, “I wish you would do something to oblige me.”
“What, my dear,” said Mrs. Methvyn in surprise.
“Please don’t call Mr. Guildford ‘a very modest young man.’”
[CHAPTER X.]
FORGIVE ME, AND GOOD-BYE.
“Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
Or only a thought stronger; I will hold your hand but as long as all may,
Or so very little longer!”
R. Browning
IT was the day of the Lingthurst ball. Cicely woke early, and tried to believe that she was in good spirits, and that her anxiety of the evening before had been exaggerated and uncalled for. And when her mother met her with the good news that Colonel Methvyn had had a calm and undisturbed night, and seemed wonderfully refreshed by it, the make-believe seemed something very like reality, and Cicely’s face looked bright enough when she met her cousin in the breakfast-room to satisfy Geneviève that her ebullition of the previous day had been forgiven, if not forgotten, or that at least it was to be tacitly ignored.