“Then it is a bargain, dear. I will be on the watch; I will keep off John. I will come and see what you think to-morrow night.”
“Good night,” she whispered. It sounded like an echo of the last word he had said.
Mr Goulburn had raised himself half out of his bed, his eyes were feverish and shining. “Who was that?” he said. “You were talking to some one at the door.”
Helen stood with a candle in her hand, which threw a vivid light upon her face, bringing out its soft brilliancy of tint, the blush that hung over it like a faint rose-shadow, the dewy dazzlement of agitation in the eyes amid the surrounding darkness. She said very softly, with a little catch of her breath, “It was Mr Ashton, papa.”
Mr Goulburn lay back upon his pillows with a relieved face; he laughed. “That is all right,” he said—“now I shall sleep in peace. I have two guardians instead of one.”
“Papa thinks so too,” Helen said to herself, as she went into the room where Janey was sleeping. It had all been very sudden, and she did not understand it; but there was a wonderful difference. “It is because there are two of us—not one standing alone.” Were there ever words that meant so much? And papa thought so too.
CHAPTER XIV.
“Harford? No, I don’t know anybody of the name,” Sir John had said; but while Charley was out after dinner, exercising that inalienable privilege of an Englishman to do absurd things, which everybody recognises in France, he heard a great deal about the English family in the village, which made him think. Helen was said to have spoken of Fareham, which Sir John knew very well; and Ashton had recognised this mysterious English girl, whose presence here was so unaccountable. And there was a father in bad health—and a child. What could such people want at Latour? “You shall see her at dinner,” Cécile said; but she did not come to dinner, and Sir John, who had frowned at the prospect of a dinner-party, as he chose to call it, on the first night of his arrival, frowned still more when Helen’s apologies were made, with great earnestness and regrets far more eloquent than anything Helen would have thought of expressing, by the wife of the Précepteur. If she was to come, why didn’t she come? What was the meaning of it? Could it be some entanglement of Charley’s? his cousin thought.
“Had they anything to do with Fareham?” he asked late that night, when Charley had come in, glowing and radiant, from his night walk. “I don’t understand about these English people in the village. Where did you meet them? who are they? I don’t want any equivocal people here, in Cécile’s very village. What could they have to do with Fareham? I never heard the name there.”
“I met them somewhere in the parish,” said Charley, evasively. “I forget exactly in which house. You don’t know all the people in Fareham parish. I believe it was at a school-feast——”