‘She is lovely to me,’ said Mrs. Anderson, with a glow of pleasure. ‘And I am so glad you like your cousin, Kate.’
‘Like her! I never saw any one half so beautiful. She looks such a lady. She is so dainty, and so soft, and so nice. Could I ever grow like that? Ah! auntie, you shake your head—I don’t mean so pretty, only a little more like her, a little less like a——’
‘My dear child!’ said the gratified mother, giving Kate a hug, though it was out of doors. And at that moment, Ombra, who had been in advance, turned round, and saw the hasty embrace, and shrugged her pretty shoulders, as her habit was.
‘Mamma, I wish very much you would keep these bursts of affection till you get home,’ said Ombra. ‘The Eldridges are coming down the cliff.’
‘Oh! who are the Eldridges? I know some people called Eldridge,’ said Kate—‘at least, I don’t know them, but I have heard——’
‘Hush! they will hear, too, if you don’t mind,’ said Ombra. And Kate was silent. She was changing rapidly, even in these few days. Ombra, who snubbed her, who was not gracious to her, who gave her no caresses, had, without knowing it, attained unbounded empire over her cousin. Kate had fallen in love with her, as girls so often do with one older than themselves. The difference in this case was scarcely enough to justify the sudden passion; but Ombra looked older than she was, and was so very different a being from Kate, that her gravity took the effect of years. Already this entirely unconscious influence had done more for Kate than all the educational processes she had gone through. It woke the woman, the gentlewoman, in the child, who had done, in her brief day, so many troublesome things. Ombra suddenly had taken the ideal place in her mind—she had been elevated, all unwitting of the honour, to the shrine in Kate’s heart. Everything in her seemed perfection to the girl—even her name, her little semi-reproofs, her gentle coldness. ‘If I could but be like Ombra, not blurting things out, not saying more than I mean, not carried away by everything that interests me,’ she said, self-reproachfully, with rising compunction and shame for all her past crimes. She had never seen the enormity of them as she did now. She set up Ombra, and worshipped her in every particular, with the enthusiasm of a fanatic. She tried to curb her once bounding steps into some resemblance to the other’s languid pace; and drove herself and Maryanne frantic by vain endeavours to smoothe her rich crisp chestnut hair into the similitude of Ombra’s shadowy, dusky locks. This sudden worship was independent of all reason. Mrs. Anderson herself was utterly taken by surprise by it, and Ombra had not as yet a suspicion of the fact; but it had already begun to work upon Kate.
It was not in her, however, to make the acquaintance of this group of new people without a little stir in her pulses—all the more as Mrs. Eldridge came up to herself with special cordiality.
‘I am sure this is Miss Courtenay,’ she said. ‘I have heard of you from my nephew and nieces at Langton-Courtenay. They told me you were coming to the Island. I hope you will like it, and think it as pretty as I do. You are most welcome, I am sure, to Shanklin.’
‘Are you their aunt at Langton-Courtenay?’ said Kate, with eyes which grew round with excitement and pleasure. ‘Oh! how very odd! I did not think anybody knew me here.’
‘I am aunt to the boys and girls,’ said Mrs. Eldridge. ‘Mrs. Hardwick is my husband’s sister. We must be like old friends, for the Hardwicks’ sake.’