“Oh!” she cried, as if she now knew that he felt with her. “That is it! The afternoon is different.”
“Well, fortunately, you and I have—much of the morning left.”
She made no reply to that, and he wondered in silence what was the employment which filled her mornings and fitted her to enjoy with so keen a zest this early ride. The Gloucester up-coach was coming to meet them, the guard tootling merrily on his horn, and a blue and yellow flag—the Whig colours—flying on the roof of the coach, which was crowded with smiling passengers. Vaughan saw the girl’s eyes sparkle as the two coaches passed one another amid a volley of badinage; and demure as she was, he was sure that she had a store of fun within. He wished that she would remove her cheap thread gloves that he might see if her hands were as white as they were small. She was no common person, he was sure of that; her speech was correct, though formal, and her manner was quiet and refined. And her eyes—he must make her look at him again!
“You are going to Bristol?” he said. “To stay there?”
Perhaps he threw too much feeling into his voice. At any rate the tone of her answer was colder. “Yes,” she said, “I am.”
“I am going as far as Chippenham,” he volunteered.
“Indeed!”
There! He had lost all the ground he had gained. She thought him a possible libertine, who aimed at putting himself on a footing of intimacy with her. And that was the last thing—confound it, he meant that to do her harm was the last thing he had in his mind.
It annoyed him that she should think anything of that kind. And he cudgelled his brain for a subject at once safe and sympathetic, without finding one. But either she was not so deeply offended as he fancied, or she thought him sufficiently punished. For presently she addressed him; and he saw that she was ever so little embarrassed.
“Would you please to tell me,” she said, in a low voice, “how much I ought to give the coachman?”