‘You could not say anything that hurts,’ he said in a low voice, ‘it would not hurt coming from you.’
‘Well, perhaps it ought not,’ she said, with a smile, ‘because it is said in true friendship. I noticed that at once in Cara—sometimes one and sometimes the other—like both. That is not the case with my boys. I shall not have Edward till Christmas. You know it has always been my happy time when the boys were here.’
‘Is Oswald doing anything—?’ A close observer would have seen that Mr. Beresford was not fond of Oswald. He was not nearly so well-disposed to him as Mrs. Meredith was to Cara. Perhaps it was purely on moral grounds and justifiable; perhaps the young man and his senior came in each other’s way more than the girl and the matron did. This abrupt question rather put a stop to poor Mrs. Meredith. She blushed a little and faltered as she replied.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE YOUNG PEOPLE.
Cara’s second evening at home was passed much more happily than the first, thanks to Mrs. Meredith, and her spirits rose in consequence; but next morning there ensued a fall, as was natural, in her spiritual barometer. She went to the window in the drawing-room when she was all alone, and gazed wistfully at as much as she could see of the step and entrance of the house next door. Did they mean her to ‘run in half-a-dozen times a day,’ as Mrs. Meredith had said? Cara had been brought up in her aunt’s old-fashioned notions, with strenuous injunctions not ‘to make herself cheap,’ and to cultivate ‘a proper pride.’ She had often been told that running into sudden intimacy was foolish, and that a girl should be rather shy than eager about overtures of ordinary friendship. All these things restrained her, and her own disposition which favoured all reserves. But she could not help going to the window and looking out wistfully. Only a wall between them! and how much more cheerful it was on the other side of that wall. Her heart beat as she saw Oswald come out, not because it was Oswald—on the whole she would have preferred his mother; but solitude ceased to be solitude when friendly figures thus appear, even outside. Oswald glanced up and saw her. He took off his hat—he paused—finally, he turned and came up the steps just underneath where she was standing. In another moment he came in, his hat in his hand, his face full of brightness of the morning. Nurse showed him in with a sort of affectionate enthusiasm. ‘Here is Mr. Oswald, Miss Cara, come to see you.’
The women servants were all the slaves of the handsome young fellow. Wherever he went he had that part of the community on his side.
‘I came to see that you are not the worse for your dull dinner last evening,’ he said. ‘It used to be etiquette to ask for one’s partner at a ball; how much more after a domestic evening. Have you a headache? were you very much bored? It is for my interest to know, that I may be able to make out whether you will come again.’
‘Were you bored that you ask me?’ said Cara. ‘I was very happy.’
‘And, thanks to you, I was very happy,’ he said. ‘Clearly four are better company than three. Your father and my mother have their own kind of talking. Why, I have not been in this room since I was a child; how much handsomer it is than ours! Come, Cara, tell me all about the pictures and the china. Of course you must be a little connoisseur. Should one say connoisseuse? I never know. Virtuosa, that is a prettier word, and we are all in the way of the cardinal virtues here.’