“Mary,” said Lilias again, just as Mary was falling asleep, “Captain Beverley will be at the Brocklehurst ball this year. He is to be staying at Romary.”
“I thought you said you were never going again,” said Mary, who had her wits about her, sleepy though she was.
“But you would hot like to go without me, I know,” replied Lilias, meekly. “Oh, Mary, I do wish we could have new dresses for once!”
Mary did not consider this observation worth waking up to answer. But her dreams were a strange medley—Captain Beverley dancing at a ball with his great grandmother Mawde, dressed all in scarlet, as if she were Red Riding-hood, but with a face like Lilias’s. And what Lilias’s dreams were, who can say?
But the Brocklehurst ball was three weeks off as yet, and there was no lack of opportunities of discussing it with Captain Beverley.
Surely November this year must have been an exceptionally fine one, for there seemed few days on which Arthur Beverley did not find his way through the woods, or by the road, to the Rectory, with some excuse in the shape of further plans to be shown to Mr Western, or a book to lend to the girls or their mother, or without any, save the sight of his own bright face, and an eager proposal that they should all set off on a long ramble somewhere or other, instead of wasting one of the few fine days of late autumn, moping in the house. And by degrees it came to be a matter of course that, if the owner of Hathercourt Edge chose to drop in at any or every meal, he should be welcome, and that if he stayed away he should be missed, and Mrs Western’s fears and vague apprehensions gradually softened, now that this terrible wolf had actually taken up his quarters in the midst of her flock without, so far, any of them being the worse!
“He seems like a sort of elder brother among them all,” she said to her husband. “I wish Basil had been at home—contact with such a man would have done him good.”
Mr Western agreed with her, for he, too, had greatly “taken” to the young stranger. It was pleasant to him to find that he had not altogether fallen out of the ways of his class, that cares, and small means, and living out of the world had not crusted over his former self past recognition. Arthur Beverley had not been at college, but he, as well as his host, had been an Eton boy, and poor George, to whom the name of Eton was that of a forbidden Paradise, listened with delight to the many reminiscences in common of his father and his guest, notwithstanding the quarter of a century which divided their experiences. So everybody in his or her own way felt pleased with Captain Beverley, and his coming seemed to have brought new life and sunshine into the Rectory. Lilias alone spoke little of him, and Mary sometimes lay awake at night “thinking.”