“Why should mamma, only because she is mamma, cover up all her pretty hair? It is such pretty hair! mine is just the same colour,” said Bell, who was inclined to vanity.
Lady Markham smiled upon this charming nonsense, but it was not her own smile. “Has any one seen Paul this morning?” she said, with a sigh.
What a change there was in everything! Paul had not come into his mother’s dressing-room last night to talk over all he had been doing and meant to do, as had always been his habit when he came home. And when Lady Markham went to her boy’s room on her way down stairs, thinking of nothing but the little laughing lecture she was wont to administer on finding him not yet out of bed—which was the usual state of affairs—what was her surprise to find Paul out of his room, already dressed, and “gone for a walk.” Brown meeting her in the hall told her this with a subdued voice and mingled wonder and sympathy in his face.
“Mr. Markham is turning over a new leaf, my lady,” he said, with the license of an old servant, who had seen Paul born, so to speak.
“I am very glad to hear it—it is so much better for him,” Lady Markham said. So it was, no doubt; but this change, even of the bad habit which was familiar to her, gave her a little shock. Therefore it was with a failure of her usual bright cheerfulness that she took her place at the breakfast-table.
“Has any one seen Paul?” she said.
“Oh, fancy seeing Paul already!” cried the little girls. “He will come in when we have all done breakfast, and Brown will bring him everything quite hot, after we have waited and waited. Brown makes dreadful favourites, don’t you think so? He does not mind what he does for Paul.”
“Paul has gone out for a walk,” said Lady Markham, not without solemnity.
There was a cry of astonishment all round the table. Roland gave Harry a little nod of intelligence. (“He will have found it was no use, and he will have taken him away.”) Alice had looked up into her mother’s face with consternation; but as she was Paul’s unhesitating partisan through everything, she recovered herself at once.
“He must be showing Mr. Spears the Park,” she said. “What a good thing if he will take to getting up early.”