“How well you are looking, Ralph!” broke from her involuntarily. And it was very true. For all that he was tired and travel-stained, for he had come in to see his mother before changing his clothes, the young man certainly looked his very best. There was a healthy brown flush under his somewhat sallow skin, which improved him vastly, and showed to advantage the dark, rather too deep set eyes, whose colour I never could succeed in defining. His figure, always lithe and sinewy, seemed to have gained in vigour and erectness. He looked both taller and stronger; his whole carriage told of greater heartiness and elasticity, a quicker and healthier flow of the life-blood in his veins.
He looked pleased at the gratification involuntarily displayed in his mother’s tone, for till then her manner had chilled and perplexed him. She was more cordial than when he had left her, but she looked uneasy and depressed, and received him with the manner of one almost against her convictions, allowing to return to favour a but half-penitent culprit. Her “So you are back again, Ah, well!” had something rather piteous in its tone of reproach and resignation, but was, at the same time, exceedingly irritating. “Let bygones be bygones,” it seemed to say. “You have been an undutiful son, but I am the most magnanimous and long-suffering of mothers.” Underlying all this, however, was a different feeling, an evident anxiety as to his well-being, evinced by the heartiness of her exclamation as to his satisfactory looks. And besides this, he felt convinced she was concealing something which she believed would distress him; for, with all her worldly-mindedness and class prejudice, Lady Severn was the most transparent and honest-intentioned of women. He could not make it out, nor ask to have it explained; for, joined to his constitutional reserve, his mother and he were not, never had been, on such terms as to allow him frankly to beg her to confide to him the cause of her evident uneasiness. So they separated for the night. He, happy man, to forget all mysteries and misgivings in the thought of tomorrow’s meeting with Marion. Poor Ralph!
The morning came only too soon to dispel his dream. He did not see the children at breakfast as usual, and on expressing his surprise was told by his mother that they now breakfasted separately, as otherwise it made them too late for their lessons.
“Then does Miss Freer come earlier now?” was on his tongue to ask, but something in the air of satisfaction with which Florence was sipping her coffee, stopped his intention.
“I shall not mention my darling’s name before her,” he said to himself.
A few minutes later Lotty and Sybil ran in “just for one moment, Grandmamma,” clamorous in their welcome of their truant uncle. While they were still busy hugging Sir Ralph, the bell rang.
“Oh come, Lotty, do,” said Sybil the virtuous, “that will be Miss Brown.”
“Miss Brown,” quoth Ralph, in haste, “who the—who on earth is she?”
“Our governess, since Miss Freer left,” replied Lotty, (Sybil was as yet incapable of approaching the subject of Miss Freer’s departure without tears, and therefore was wise enough to leave the explanation to Lotty’s less sensitive tongue). “Didn’t you know, Uncle Ralph, that Miss Freer had left? She went away with Mrs. Archer, but she would have left off teaching us at any rate. Grandmamma thought she was not ‘inexperienced’ enough for us now we are getting so big. Not instructed enough, though she was very kind. Miss Brown plays far grander on the piano. You can hear her quite across the street. Just like the band on the Place. And she——.”
“Lotty,” said her grandmother sharply, “you talk much too fast. It is not for little girls like you to discuss their elders. Go now, both of you, at once, to Miss Brown, and be good girls.”