"It did not require a conjurer to prophesy that," is Cecilia's comment. "I never saw two people who troubled themselves less to disguise their feelings. I saw that they neither of them knew whether they were on their heads or on their heels, when they emerged dripping from that horrid pine wood. Dear me!"—with a good-sized sigh—"how smoothly things run for some people! how easily some of these affairs come off, without a hitch anywhere from beginning to end!"
She pauses, and it is plain to those acquainted with her heart history that her thoughts are coursing mournfully back to the all-along reluctant and ultimately entirely faithless clergyman who had last possessed her young affections.
"Without a hitch from beginning to end?" cries Jim hotly, jarred more than he would like to own to himself by this phrase. "How can you possibly tell? These are early days to assert that so dogmatically.
"'There's many a slip
'Twixt the cup and the lip.'"
"Do you mean to say that you think it will not come off?" asks Cecilia, a slightly pleasurable light coming into her eyes as she asks—not that she has any ill-will towards Elizabeth, nor any distinct design of her own upon Byng; but that there is something not absolutely disagreeable to her in the idea of his being still among the ranks of the possible.
"I am sure he would make a delightful husband," puts in Sybilla, her praise given emphasis by her desire to employ it as a weapon of offence against one who is at present more deeply than usual in her black books; "he has such gentle, feminine ways; he comes into a room so quietly, and when he asks one how one is really listens for the answer."
"Perhaps you are right, and it will fall through," says Cecilia thoughtfully; "many engagements do!" (sighing again). "She is a sweet, pretty creature, and looks as if butter would not melt in her mouth; but she is evidently older than he."
"Jim will not allow that to be an objection," cries Sybilla, with a faint laugh, "will you, Jim? How much older than you is Amelia? I always forget."
"I never can help thinking that she has a history," resumes Cecilia, in a meditative voice, "and that Mr. Greenock knows it. If ever her name is mentioned he always begins to look wise, as if there were something that he was longing to tell one about her; it is continually on the tip of his tongue—some day it will tumble over the tip."
"I do not think that there is any use in my staying all this while!" cries Jim, jumping up. "Dr. Coldstream cannot be here at soonest for another hour; and I do not think that we are, any of us, very good company for each other to-day, so I will look in again later."