“Oh! don’t you know? If you do not know Mary we should not talk to you—we only ought to talk to friends—and besides, you have no right to call her Mary if you do not know her,” said Lilias. She turned back to say this after she had gone a few steps away from him, following Nello, who, tired of the conversation, had gone on with his guardian to the Chase.
“That is quite true, and I beg your pardon,” said Geoff; “it must be Miss Musgrave you mean.”
Lilias nodded approving. She began to take an interest in this big boy. He was not strictly handsome, but had a bright, attractive countenance, and the child scarcely ever saw any male creature except Eastwood and Mr. Pen. “Have you come to see her?” she asked wistfully; “are you going to be a—friend?”
“Yes,” said Geoff with a little emotion, “if she will let me. I am waiting to know. And tell me your name?” he added, with a slight tremor in his voice, for he was young and easily touched. “I will always be a friend to you.”
“I am Lilias,” she said shyly, giving him her hand, for which he had held out his. And this was how Eastwood found them when he came bustling out to inform my lord that Miss Musgrave would see his lordship, if he would be good enough to step this way. Eastwood was much “struck” to see his lordship holding “little Miss’s” hand. It raised little Miss in the butler’s opinion. “If she had been a bit older, now!” he said to himself. Geoff was half reluctant to leave this little new acquaintance for the audience which he had come here expressly to ask. Mary was not likely to be so easily conciliated as little Lilias. And being a lord did not make him less shy. He waved his hand and took off his hat with a little sigh, as he followed Eastwood into the house; and Lilias, for her part, followed Nello slowly, with various thoughts in her small head. These it must be allowed were chiefly about the little girls who wanted to make friends with her—and of whom her lonely imagination made ecstatic pictures—and of the lovely horses who could spin her away over the broad country, if that big boy would let them. But Lilias did not think very much about the big boy himself.
Geoff went in blushing and tremulous to Miss Musgrave’s drawing-room. It was not a place so suitable to Mary as her favourite hall, being dark and somewhat low, not worthy either of her or of Penninghame Castle. She was standing, waiting to receive him, and after the bow with which he greeted her, Geoff did not know what to say to disclose his object. His object itself was vague, and he had no previous knowledge of her, as his cousin Mary had, to warrant him in addressing her. She offered him a chair, and she sat down opposite him; and then there began an embarrassing pause which she would not, and which he did not seem able to, break. At last, faltering and stammering—
“I came, Miss Musgrave,” he began, “to say—I came to tell you—I came to ask—Circumstances,” cried Geoff, impatient of his own incapacity, “seem to have made our families enemies. I don’t know why they should have done so.”
“If the story is true, Lord Stanton, it is easy enough to see how they should have done so. My brother was concerned, they say, in your brother’s death.”
“No one could prove that he did it, Miss Musgrave.”
“He did not do it with intention, I am sure,” she said. “But so much is true. It was done, and how could we be friends after? We should have been angels—you to pardon the loss you had sustained, we to pardon the wrong we had done.”