“My dear Amy, what are you talking about?” said Cicely bewilderedly.
“The man who bowed to you just now, I want to know who he is. He must be a friend of yours; he keeps giving little glances to see if it’s any use for him to bow again. Now, Cicely, you must see him.”
Cicely looked up. This time she at once caught sight of the person her sister had been so perseveringly pointing out to her. A rather tall, dark man—handsome, Amiel had called him; he was standing but a few yards away from where they were sitting, apparently engrossed in the picture before him. But as Cicely watched him, he again glanced in their direction; in another moment he had returned Cicely’s bow and had crossed the room towards the sisters.
“Amiel, you must let me introduce Mr. Guildford to you,” said Miss Methvyn. Lady Forrester bowed and smiled, but from the expression of her face Cicely saw that she had either not heard the name correctly, or had failed to associate it with any one of whom she had any previous knowledge.
“Do you admire that horrible picture you have been looking at so long?” she said brightly, imagining that she was only addressing some ordinary acquaintance of her sister’s, and that a little small-talk was desirable, little dreaming that this meeting, this chance, matter-of-fact coming across each other in a London picture gallery, was to the two beside her a crisis in life, an unacknowledged goal, to which, for ten long months, each had been secretly and with ever-increasing anxiety looking forward. Mr. Guildford smiled as he replied—to some extent he understood the position, Cicely’s forte had never been small-talk, and her sister was evidently in the habit of taking the lead on such occasions—“No,” he said, “I certainly don’t admire it. But I don’t think it is ‘horrible;’ it is too unnatural to be anything worse than annoying. Anatomically speaking, it is an impossible figure.”
“Oh! you mean the twist in the right arm,” said Lady Forrester. “Yes, that was pointed out to me. But I never look at pictures critically as my sister does. I only think if they are pretty or ugly.”
Mr. Guildford smiled again. But it was a smile concealing an intense anxiety. Why would not Cicely speak? She stood there beside her sister, calm and quiet as ever, unruffled apparently in the slightest degree by this sudden meeting, which had set his heart beating and his pulses throbbing almost beyond his power to conceal. No, there was not, there never could be, any hope for him, such as, during these weary months, he had now and then wildly dreamt of. It was a cruel fate surely which thus tantalised him. He answered Lady Forrester’s remarks in her own strain, smiled, and looked interested in the right place, so that Amiel mentally pronounced him an agree able man, and wondered again who he was and where her sister had met him. But ever and anon he glanced at Cicely. She seemed to him to have gained in beauty since he last saw her; there was a mixture of bright colour in her dress now, she looked well and untroubled. “I suppose she is quite happy now that she has got her sister again,” he thought. “Well, I should be glad of it; she was very friendless.”
But somehow he felt further away from her than he had ever done before—further away even than on that miserable day when the news of her engagement to her cousin had revealed to him his own feelings towards her and had broken down his self-control. He felt now as if she could never again have need of him, as if their paths must henceforth utterly diverge. “Evidently these Forresters are rich and fashionable,” he thought, with an unreasonable impulse of irritation at poor Amiel’s pretty dress and general air of breeding and prosperity. “No doubt, Lady Forrester is ambitious and has her own ideas about her sister’s future. I hate fashionable people;” little suspecting that as these reflections were crossing his brain, the subject of his animadversions was saying to herself, “I wonder who he is. He is very good-looking, and clever I should think. Ever so much more like other people than some of Cicely’s friends—that odd-looking little Mr. Hayle, for instance.”
But when, in a few minutes, Lady Forrester’s small-talk gave signs of coming to an end, Mr. Guildford turned to go. He had already bowed to the sisters without shaking hands with either, and was just moving away, when almost as if involuntarily, Miss Methvyn uttered his name. “Mr. Guildford,” she said, with a half appeal in her tone which puzzled him, “will you not come to see us as you promised? I am sure Amy will be pleased if you will.”
She turned to her sister. Lady Forrester looked surprised, but replied smilingly, without hesitation and with only so very slight a touch of constraint in her voice that Cicely trusted Mr. Guildford would not detect its presence—“Certainly, Sir Herbert and I are always pleased to see any friend of my sister’s. I hope you will come to see us.”