“There will be just as many dances every night, and all night long, and we at Thorne!” cried Beatrice. Gussy, who looked down upon them both from the altitude of two and twenty, shook her head with a certain grandeur of superior experience.
“Oh, you silly girls! if you had seen as much of it as I have! The opera is all very well, and so are the dances; but you don’t know how tiresome they get when you go on and on. Yes; it is my fourth season, Mr. Arden, and I think I have a right to be tired.”
Lady Augusta gave her daughter a warning look. “The more seasons you can count the less disposed you will be to speak so very frankly of them,” she said; “but Mr. Arden has been too much with us not to know what a chatterbox you are.”
“Yes,” said Edgar; “how good it has been of you to let me be so much with you. It has made town so much more pleasant to me than it could have been otherwise; and now I have come to bid you good-bye, though I am glad to think it will not be for long.”
“To bid us good-bye!” they all cried, with surprise. And Lady Augusta cast another significant glance over the heads of Mary and Beatrice, who were too heedless to take any notice, at the daughter whose interests were more specially concerned.
“Yes,” said Edgar; “Clare has written begging me to go to her directly. I am going on Saturday. I had no idea of it when I saw you yesterday; and after all I shall be in Lancashire before you are. I don’t even know why it is I am sent for by my sovereign Clare.”
Once more a look passed between Lady Augusta and her elder girls. They did not believe one word of this story. They took it quite simply for granted that he was doing this to be near them, to be within reach of Gussy. Gussy herself even was convinced. She had doubted and shaken her head when the entire household had been persuaded of the fact. But now a little flush of gratification lighted up her cheeks. She could no longer resist the conviction that his coming and going depended somehow, as she said modestly to herself, on “us.”
“It is strange of Clare to send you such a summons,” said Lady Augusta; “but I daresay she is very lonely, poor child. I do hope we shall see a great deal more of her at Thorne when we get home. To tell the truth, I am very glad you are going. I do not like to think of her, still in mourning as she is, and left in that house all alone.”
“Yes; I have been a little forgetful of Clare, I fear,” Edgar said, without thought; and the girls, who were now very attentive, made another rapid comment within themselves all in a breath. He has been thinking so much of Gussy! How funny it was! How nice to be Gussy, for whose sake a man “forgot all about” his duties! A little thrill of interest ran through the assembled family; and even kind Lady Augusta, who had become, as she herself said, “quite attached” to Edgar, was a little moved by the thought of what might be coming.
“You are never forgetful of anybody, I am sure,” she said, “unless with a very strong motive. I don’t like to praise people to their faces; but I never saw any one less apt to think of himself than you.”