“Did he say how he was?” asked Cicely.
“Yes, he says he is better,” replied Mr. Guildford; “but I thought the tone of his letter seemed dull, and he says he finds it rather lonely work travelling about all by himself.”
“Yes, poor old man,” said Miss Methvyn thoughtfully; “I think it is very sad to see any one grow old with no one belonging to them. Dr. Farmer has nobody at all.”
“Was he never married?” asked Mr. Guildford.
“No,” said Cicely, “but he was going to be married once. There was some story about it, my father knows it I think—Dr. Farmer belongs to this neighbourhood—the girl died I believe. Fancy! it must be nearly fifty years ago, and I speak of her as a girl; but she will always have seemed a girl to him.”
“Yes,” replied the young man, “to him she will always have been sweet-and-twenty. And if she had lived to be Mrs. Farmer, she would probably have grown stout and buxom, and not impossibly the cares of life would have developed a temper.”
Miss Methvyn glanced at her companion with some curiosity. Then she said quietly, “You are not really the least cynical, Mr. Guildford, why do you talk as if you were?”
He smiled, “Do you dislike it?”
“I think I do,” she said. “Don’t think me rude for saying that that tone of talk is so commonplace nowadays, that—”
She stopped short. He smiled again, but with a slight change of expression, “You mean that the affectation of it is commonplace, I think,” he said. “It is very easily affected, but I was in earnest. I think it is well to look on both sides of a possible picture, and a disappointed bachelor should surely be allowed the consolation of thinking that, after all, the fairest flowers do fade, or at least lose their beauty.”