“I didn’t mean it, dear,” said Myra, penitent. “I’m so sorry, I beg your pardon, Phil. Lady Mary’s a dear, and I wouldn’t laugh at her for all the world. But don’t you ever mimic anyone, there’s a good boy; for one gets into the habit without knowing what one does.”
“Oh, that’s all very fine,” said Phil, feeling the exhortation against a sin for which he had no capability to be out of place; but he did not refuse to make up the incipient quarrel. As for Harry, he had not listened, and consequently was not aware how much share he had in the cause of the general hilarity.
“I should like to know what all the fun’s about,” he said. “Good lord! to see you all at it like girls at school! Ladies are like sheep, it seems to me—where one goes you all follow; because that good little aunt of mine has a craze about education, do you all mean to make muffs of yourselves? Well, I’m not a man that stands up for superior intellect and that sort of thing—much; but, good gracious! do you ever see men go in for that sort of nonsense?”
“That is because you are all so much cleverer, and better educated to start with, Mr. Thornleigh,” said Sissy Witherington. He looked up at her to see if she were laughing at him; but Sissy was incapable of satire, and meant what she said.
“Well, perhaps there is something in that,” said Harry, mollified, stroking his moustache.
Harry lunched with the Witheringtons at their urgent request, and thus shook himself free from Phil, who was disposed, in the absence of Earnshaw, to attach himself to his cousin. Mrs. Witherington made much of the visitor, not without a passing thought that if by any chance he should take a fancy to Myra—and of course Myra to him, though that was a secondary consideration—why, more unlikely things might come to pass. But Harry showed no dispositions that way, and stood and stared out of the window of the front drawing-room, after luncheon, towards Mrs. Smith’s lodgings, on the other side of the Green, with a pertinacity which amazed his hostesses. When he left them he walked in the same direction slowly, with his eyes still fixed on the cottage with its green shutters and dishevelled creepers. Poor Harry could not think of any excuse for a second call; he went along the road towards the cottage hoping he might meet the object of his thoughts, and stared in at the window through the matted growth of holly and rhododendrons in the little garden, equally without effect. She had been seated there on the previous evening, but she was not seated there now. He took a long walk, and came back again once more, crossing slowly under the windows, and examining the place; but still saw nothing. If Margaret had only known of it, where she sat listlessly inside feeling extremely dull, and in want of a little excitement, how much good it would have done her! and she would not have been so unkind as to refuse her admirer a glance. But she did not know, and Harry went back very unhappy, dull and depressed, and feeling as if life were worth very little indeed to him. Had that heavenly vision appeared, only to go out again, to vanish for ever, from the eyes which could never forget the one glimpse they had had of her? Harry had never known what it was to be troubled with extravagant hopes or apprehensions before.
CHAPTER V.
Mrs. Smith.
“Still no Mr. Earnshaw,” said Lady Mary. “This business of his and yours is a long affair then, Tom. I wanted to send down to those cousins of his to ask them to dinner, or something. I suppose I must write a little civil note, and tell Mrs. Smith why I delay doing so. It is best to wait till he comes back.”
“I’ll take your note, Aunt Mary,” said Harry, with alacrity. “Oh, no, it will not inconvenience me in the least. I shall be passing that way.”
“I suppose you want to see the beauty again?” said Lady Mary, smiling. “She is very pretty. But I don’t care much for the looks of the brother. He has an uncertain way, which would be most uncomfortable in illness. If he were to stand on one foot, and hesitate, and look at you like that, to see what you were thinking of him, when some one was ill! A most uncomfortable doctor. I wish we may not have been premature about poor old Dr. Franks.”