To be smitten with the face of Lotte was to desire to obtain her. He viewed it as a question of time and money, and he made a memorandum in his note-book to that effect.
Lotte, thus favoured by his admiration and his intentions, had not observed him; if she had, she would have forgotten him immediately afterwards.
No; her thoughts were employed upon the future. Under the care and kindness of Flora, she had in one short week won back more strength and health than she would have done in a month under the roof of Mrs. Bantom, or such an one as she could herself afford. It must be remembered, too, that her mind was at peace in respect to the present, and hopeful as regarded the future.
One week longer she decided to stay beneath the roof of her good friend, and then into the world again, that she might eat the bread for which her own hands had laboured successfully. It was in vain that Flora endeavoured to change her determination; her self-dependent nature and free spirit recoiled from being indebted even to Flora for a home. So long as she had strength to work, and was able to obtain it, she would support herself until she became the wife of the man she had yet to see and love, and then if able to keep her, she would accept the luxury the wedded state might afford her; if not, they would work together, and together win a living for both.
She did not refuse to accept from Flora a complete stock of clothes, nor the loan of a small sum of money to start with, nor did she ridiculously refuse her profferred assistance in procuring an apartment in a respectable dwelling; nor when Flora urged upon her to employ her abilities upon some description of needlework less slavish and better paid than cap-front making, did she refuse to make the effort, or hesitate to accept work from a juvenile clothing warehouse, obtained through the influence of Flora’s new dressmaker.
Her spirit of independence was neither fastidious nor affected; it was genuine, sincere, and directed her along a path that, while by her open, ingenuous, cheerful, loving disposition, she gained the affection of all who knew her, she commanded their respect by eschewing all obligations calculated to fetter her freedom of action.
Malcolm Grahame, during the last few days of his stay, had contrived to ascertain her name, and the information that she was a humble friend of Miss Wilton’s—a communication he received with great satisfaction, because it intimated that she was poor. To be poor was to be accessible to temptation, and he resolved to use gold profusely to gain her.
He little thought while making this ignoble calculation, that he himself stood on the very brink of a degraded beggary. Lotte was poor, but her poverty had no blur of dishonour upon it.
He caught sight of her walking alone in the garden several times, and rushed to an upper window to waft a kiss viâ his fingers to her, or to lay his hand upon the left side of a rather narrow chest, or to render himself conspicuously ridiculous in other ways. His vagaries were uselessly performed and expended without result, for Lotte did not once perceive him, and left the roof of Flora Wilton, in the Regent’s Park, without knowing, or desiring to know, that any such vain heartless coxcomb as Malcolm Grahame was in existence.
The interview between old Wilton and Grahame was brief; on the side of the former; it was conducted with cold dignity, and on the latter—after two or three revelations were made which yet further opened his eyes to the tremendous character of the gulf, on the verge of which he had stood with so slippery a footing—with an oily obsequiousness which was contemptible.