CHAPTER VII.
“My dear, this is Mrs. Lenny,” said Lady Markham. “She has kindly taken us on her way to the north.”
“How do you do, my dear young lady? The Colonel wrote me word about you all, praising you up, one more than another, and I thought I’d like to come and see. But, Lenny, you never told me how like she was to her father at her age. I think I see him before me, as handsome a boy——”
“Mrs. Lenny!” cried Alice, in consternation, yet relief. She turned to her mother a pair of questioning, wondering eyes. But Lady Markham could make no answer. She slightly shrugged, so to speak, not her shoulders, but her eyebrows. She was very polite and very hospitable, but this second arrival was almost too much for her. “I thought you looked tired, mamma,” Alice continued. “I came back to drive you home.”
Lady Markham shook her head. She was almost cross—as near that unpleasant state as it was possible for her to be. “Perhaps Mrs. Lenny would like to drive, Alice? She has had a long journey. I am not at all tired. I will wait and meet your papa.”
“How cool it is under these delicious trees,” said the lady of the pink bonnet. “Yes, indeed, if the young lady will have me, it will be a treat to be behind those beautiful ponies. Pretty creatures! like their mistress. I have not seen anything so pretty, Lenny, since we left the regiment. Ah, that was a foolish step. But one never knows when one is well off. ‘Lay mew,’ as the French say, is the enemy of ‘lay bieng.’ Thank you, my dear. Now this is delightful! I wish, instead of being within sight, we were three or four miles from the house.”
“Take Mrs. Lenny round by the fishpond,” said Lady Markham. She sighed with relief at getting rid of this new claimant upon her attention, though she was so polite. Mrs. Lenny was tall like her husband, and like him, brown and soldierly. She made the light little carriage bend on one side as she got in. Her brown face within the pink shade of the bonnet was wreathed with smiles. She was delighted like a child with the pretty equipage, and the promised drive—much more delighted than Alice was, who, though relieved of her terrors about Paul, drove off in no very happy state of mind. Yet she could not help taking a little pleasure in her own discrimination.
“I knew you were coming here the first moment I saw you,” she said. “I kept asking papa who you were. But he had not seen you—he did not know you; he never knows any one—not even, if he were to see us at a distance, mamma or me.”
“Nor I,” said Mrs. Lenny. “I should no more have known him! for you may be sure I took a good stare at the station, seeing it was somebody of consequence. He is so changed—oh, not for the worse, my dear; but when you see a nice little old gentleman instead of a pretty young one, it’s a shock, that can’t be denied. You have to count up and think back how many years it is. Somehow one never feels old one’s self. You think the world has stood still with you, though it goes so fast with all the rest.”
“I don’t feel at all like that,” said Alice. “Sometimes I feel so old—older a great deal, I am sure, than mamma.”