The door handle, turning, rattles. With one spring, Esther returns to her seat—to her deserted cows and impossible profiles. St. John looks out of the window. No transformation scene at Drury Lane could be more complete.
"Ahab—Jehu—Zimri—Omri—Joash!" recites Miss Blessington, entering, with an open Bible in her hand.
[CHAPTER XVIII.]
"I am afraid you must think it very rude of us, leaving you alone on the last evening of your visit," says Miss Blessington next day to Esther, as the two girls stand together in the conservatory, picking bits of heliotrope and maidenhair, and regardless of the ten and twenty little pots that their long gowns have knocked down; "but, you see, it is such a long-standing engagement, and we can so seldom induce Sir Thomas to go to a ball, that we really could hardly get out of it."
She speaks politely, with that friendly suavity that one feels on the ultimate and penultimate days of their stay to a guest that one is glad to be rid of.
"Oh, never mind me," says Essie, lightly; "I can always amuse myself: and, besides, it will be very nearly bedtime by the time you go."
"They intend me to go with them," St. John had said to her overnight, à propos of this ball, "and of course I intend it too; only some prophetic instinct tells me that my head will begin to ache prodigiously towards dressing-time. I am half divided between that and toothache, only I suppose that the latter necessitates the simulating of acute bodily torture, and subjects one to unlimited offers of boiled figs, hopbags, laudanum, and the Lord knows what."
Gerard had found his betrothed stubborner than he had expected as to her expressed resolution of departure. Looking at the childish roundness of her soft face, at the dewy meekness of her heavenly eyes, he had fancied her malleable by his hand, as clay by the potter's; and so, in most things, she would have been. In most things, it was to her easier to yield than to resist—less trouble—and, besides, it pleased people; but in the one prime passion of her life, her love for her brother, you might as well try to move the Tower of London with your finger and thumb as to stir her. After half an hour of arguments, persuasions, caresses, St. John is constrained vexedly to own to himself that in that young faithful heart lover-love holds as yet only the second place. The sole concession he could win from her was that of one day, the day of the ball.