"But you implied it, by expressing such exaggerated joy at their coming."
"So I did—so I do: and if they were to rise in number from two to fifty, like Falstaff's highwaymen, I should express greater joy still."
"And why?" raising herself from her cushions to get a straighter, truer look into his bright, grave eyes.
"Because," he says, lowering his voice a little, and leaning closelier over her, "the larger the party the better chance there is of undisturbed tête-à-têtes between congenial spirits. Do you see?"
And Esther does see, and thinking on Robert Brandon, is uneasily joyful.
Ere the arrival of the looked-for bazaar, Miss Craven's cure is complete. On the day preceding the one appointed for that philanthropic festivity, she has been walking in the late evening about the moon-coloured garden, free from any remaining lameness, leaning on St. John's arm. She does not need the slight stay, but it pleases him to give and her to receive it. It does not please Miss Blessington, however, watching them from an upper chamber—watching Esther dabble her small hands in the opal water in the great bronze water-lily leaf that makes the basin of the fountain—watching St. John, rapt and absorbed in her pretty foolish chatter. And yet their talk, if she could but hear it, holds nothing obnoxiously fond or flirtatious; it might be proclaimed by the bellman in the streets.
"How nice it is to be no longer a devil upon two sticks!" the young girl is saying, joyfully; and the man makes answer, "You will be up to another gallop across the park to-morrow?"
"Never, never!" she cries, bringing together emphatically her two gleaming, wet hands. "You have witnessed my first and last equestrian feat; with my own free-will I will mount never a horse again, unless it is the rocking-horse at the end of the north gallery: it is frisky, yet safe; gallops and plunges, yet stands still: that is the horse for me."
He laughs, and then they are silent.