Heaven and earth! He was so much disappointed, so much irritated, that he could have taken the young fellow by the shoulders and turned him out, when the tittering girl would no doubt have followed. To think that a couple of grinning idiots should have occupied that place, chatterers who had nothing to say to each other that might not have been said in the fullest glare of the ball-room. Lewis was annoyed beyond description. That secret corner commanded every part of the conservatory, though it was itself so sheltered. He could not walk about with Lilias, and tell her his tale under the spying of these two young fools, to whom an evident courtship would have been a delightful amusement. He was so disturbed that he could not conceal it from Lilias, who looked at him with a little anxiety, and asked,
"Are you really ill, as Margaret says?"
"I am not ill, only fretted to death. I wanted to put you in that chair, and talk to you. Does Margaret really take any interest whether I am ill or not?"
"Oh, a great deal of interest! She thinks it her duty sometimes to look severe, but there is no one that has a tenderer heart."
"But not to me. She never liked me."
"Oh, how can you say so!" Lilias cried. "She likes you—just as much as the rest."
Lewis was annoyed more than it was possible to say by the appropriation of his hermitage. And now the unexpected discovery that he was an object of interest to Margaret caught him, as it were, by the throat.
"As much—" he said, with a sigh, "and as little. Will any one remember after you have been gone a week?"
"I suppose," said Lilias, "that you will still be dancing, and dining, and driving about to Richmond, and going everywhere—for much longer than that, till the season is well over."
"I don't know what I may do," he said, disconsolately. "That does not depend upon me. But, if I do, it will be without my heart."