Gradually something white appeared in the aperture—it was a veil. Something blue—it was an eye. Something quite beyond description lovely—it was Hester herself, looking—if such be conceivable—like a scared angel!
“Oh, Mr Foster!” she exclaimed, in a half-whisper, running lightly in, and holding up a finger by way of caution, “I have so longed to see you—”
“So have I,” interrupted the delighted middy. “Dear H–—ah—Miss Sommers, I mean, I felt sure that—that—this must be your room—no, what’s its name? boudoir; and the gazelle—”
“Yes, yes—oh! never mind that,” interrupted the girl impatiently. “My father—darling father!—any news of him.”
Blushing with shame that he should have thought of his own feelings before her anxieties, Foster dropped the little hand which he had already grasped, and hastened to tell of the meeting with her father in the Kasba—the ease with which he had recognised him from her description, and the few hurried words of comfort he had been able to convey before the slave-driver interfered.
Tears were coursing each other rapidly down Hester’s cheeks while he was speaking; yet they were not tears of unmingled grief.
“Oh, Mr Foster!” she said, seizing the middy’s hand, and kissing it, “how shall I ever thank you?”
Before she could add another word, an unlucky touch of Foster’s heel laid the easel, with an amazing clatter, flat on the marble floor! Hester bounded through the doorway more swiftly than her own gazelle, slammed the door behind her, and vanished like a vision.
Poor Foster! Although young and enthusiastic, he was not a coxcomb. The thrill in the hand that had been kissed told him plainly that he was hopelessly in love! But a dull weight on his heart told him, he thought as plainly, that Hester was not in the same condition.
“Dear child!” he said, as he slowly gathered up the drawing materials, “if that innocent, transparent, almost infantine creature had been old enough to fall in love she would sooner have hit me on the nose with her lovely fist than have kissed my great ugly paw—even though she was overwhelmed with joy at hearing about her father.”