“Oh, my lovely cerise silk! To think I should have forgotten it!” said Linda, quite diverted from her line of cross-questioning. “But where will it go? I haven’t the faintest notion. My trunk is full—more than full—and pressed down. It wouldn’t hold another handkerchief.”
“Be a good girl, and promise to talk sensibly, and I may spare you a place in mine,” said Laura, smiling at her victory. “I am just going to fold and put away my last dress.”
“You are always so kind, Laura. I did not mean to tease you, but I really do feel anxious about Mr. M’Intosh. Suppose he was only amusing himself with you all the time!”
“Then you will be able to console yourself with the idea that you have seen at least one wicked person,” said Laura, with great good humour; “and so your knowledge of the great world will be expanded. But I will venture to contradict the charge, as far as he is concerned. But remember on what terms I provide a place for your forlorn dress. Besides I want to write one or two good-bye notes.”
Although Laura was outwardly calm and self-possessed, she was not wholly unmoved by certain considerations which Linda’s badinage had suggested.
Unless her perception played her false upon a subject on which women, even when inexperienced, commonly judge correctly, both Mr. Barrington Hope and Mr. M’Intosh were seriously interested in her good opinion of them. The latter gentleman had indeed been so persistent and pressing, that she had been compelled with great gentleness, yet with firmness, to discourage his advances. This step she took with a certain reluctance—more perhaps, because she had not finally resolved as to her state of feeling than because she in any way disliked him.
Dislike him? No—who could, indeed, dislike Donald M’Intosh? Was he not handsome, accomplished, manly, possessed, moreover, of all the subtle graces of manner that almost invariably attach themselves to a man, be he good, bad, or indifferent as to morals or brains, who has “seen the world,” as the phrase runs—who has met his fellow-creatures all his life under the highly-favoured circumstances of an assured position and ample means?
He certainly had been most assiduous, most respectful, most flatteringly empresse in his manner, bestowing that unconcealed admiration which gratifies the vanity of womanhood, at the same time that it is apt to arouse the ire of the virgins, both wise and foolish, who are less prominently noticed.
Then his “position,” as it is called. He possessed that social distinction, that untitled rank, which is perhaps as clearly defined, as freely yielded, or firmly refused, in a colony as in England. He was a great country gentleman—such a man as in Britain a hundred years ago would have periodically gone up to London in his family carriage attended by outriders and driven by postillions. Here in the colonies he was known as a man of good family, who had inherited large estates, besides pastoral possessions of even greater value, lands in city and suburbs, houses in fashionable squares all derived from well-considered investments in those early days when every hundred pounds in cash—sometimes even a tenth of that proverbial sum—so invested bore fruit fiftyfold or a thousandfold, as the case might be.