“O Ada!” said Gussy, with a little shrug of her shoulders; and then she glanced at her sister, and a glimmer of moisture came into the corners of her bright eyes. “She is the greatest darling that ever was! I don’t think there is anybody so good in the whole world!” she said, under her breath, and dashed away that drop of dew from her eyelashes. “It is so absurd to make any fuss,” she added a moment after. “One knows it must be, but one cannot help being sorry sometimes when one sees——” and here Gussy’s voice failed her, and she bit her lip, that she might not be proved to have broken down.
“You are a dear, kind girl to feel for her so,” cried Edgar, putting out his hand to give her a grasp of sympathy; and then he remembered suddenly that he was a man and she a woman, and that an invisible line was stretched between them. “It is very hard,” he said, checking himself with a half laugh, “that you are not your brother, or I my own sister for the moment, because I must not say (I suppose) how sorry I am, nor how I like you for it; but I do all the same. Don’t you think if we were to lay our heads together and get him a living——”
“Oh, hush,” said Gussy, growing paler, and this time quite unable to conceal the tears that rushed to her eyes. “Did you really never hear about him? He died a year ago. It was not our fault. He went to the East-End of London, you know, and worked dreadfully hard, and caught a fever. Oh, will you take that chair between me and Ada, please! Don’t you see she always wears black and white—nothing else—but you men never notice what any one wears.”
Edgar made the change as he was desired, and this time all the etiquettes that ever were invented would not have kept him from taking Gussy’s soft hand into his, and holding it kindly, tenderly, as a sympathising brother might have done. He would have taken her into his arms, had he dared, in affectionate kindness and sympathy. He was too much moved to say a word, but he held her hand fast, and looked at her with his heart in his eyes.
“Thanks,” said Gussy, crying softly; “what a kind, friendly boy you are! Oh, I am sure I never meant to talk of this any more. I was in a fury with papa and mamma at the time, and said a great many things I ought not to have said; but, of course, one knows that it had to be—they could not have done anything else.”
“Couldn’t they?” said Edgar. “Is money everything then? I am a stranger in this sort of a world, and I don’t know.”
“If it is not everything, it is a great deal,” said Gussy. “And now, can’t you understand what I mean when I say a man is nice who can make himself nice, without meaning anything? Why, there is you,” she added, with a spice of malice. “You don’t do it in Arthur Arden’s way; but you are very kind to one, and very pleasant; and it makes one so much at one’s ease when one sees you don’t mean anything. There! That is a bold argument; but now you will understand what I mean to say.”
Gussy got up when she had delivered this shot, and ran over to the other side of the room to get her work, as she said, leaving Edgar very silent and considerably bewildered. It was a new sensation to him. Was he supposed to mean anything, he wondered? He felt that he had received an arrow, but he did not quite understand how or why it came; and he was a little sore, it must be confessed, to hear himself classed with Arthur Arden as one of the men who meant nothing. In his own consciousness he meant a great deal—— he meant the most cordial brotherliness, affection, and sympathy. He had “taken to” the Thornleighs, as people say. He liked to go to their house; he liked to talk to them all, one almost as much as the others, and Lady Augusta as much as any of her girls. This was what he meant; but could it be that some other meaning was expected of him? Then he noticed with some surprise that Lady Augusta was quite cognisant of the fact that Gussy had left him, and that he was sitting all alone and silent, pondering and confused. Why should she note so very unimportant a transaction? And she called him to her side immediately on a most transparent pretext.
“Mr. Arden, come and tell me your last news from Clare,” she said. “It is very hard-hearted of her not to come with you to town. And it must be very dull for her at Arden, all by herself. Has she got old Miss Arden from Escott, or good Mrs. Seldon with her? What, nobody! that must surely be dull even for Clare——”
“So I thought,” said Edgar; “but she will not come——”