And he had been so good to her! He had been so watchful, so assiduous, so delicate, she had fondly, foolishly deemed his court a secret from all.
The way to her heart had not been difficult. Her father's death had cast her, a timid country girl, into the vortex of the town, where for a time she had shrunk from the whirl of routs and masquerades, the smirking beaux and loud-voiced misses, among whom she found herself. She had sat mum and abashed in companies where her coarser sister ruled and ranted; where one had shunned and another had flouted the silent, pale-faced girl, whose eyes and hair and tall slender shape just redeemed her from insignificance. Only Mr. Hawkesworth, the Irishman, had discerned in her charms that in a remarkably short time won his regards and fixed his attentions. Only he, with the sensibility of an unspoiled Irish heart, had penetrated the secret of her loneliness; and in company had murmured sympathy in her ear, and at the opera, where he had not the entrée to her sister's box, had hung on her looks from afar, speaking more sweetly with his fine eyes than Monticelli or Amorevoli sang on the stage.
For Sir Hervey, his would-be rival, the taciturn, middle-aged man, who was Hervey to half the men about town, and Coke to three-fourths of the women; who gamed with the same nonchalance with which he made his court--he might be the pink of fashion in his dull mooning way, but he had nothing that caught her eighteen-year-old fancy. On the contrary he had a habit of watching her, when Hawkesworth was present, at the mere remembrance of which her cheek flamed. For that alone, and in any event, she hated him; and would never, never marry him. They might rob her of her dear Irishman; they might break her heart--so her thoughts ran to the tremolo of a passionate sob; they might throw her into a decline; but they should never, never compel her to take him! She would live on bread and water for a year first. She was fixed, fixed, fixed on that, and would ever remain so.
Meanwhile downstairs the two who remained in the room she had left kept silence until her footsteps ceased to sound on the stairs. Then Mr. Northey permitted his discontent to appear. "I wish, after all, I had told her," he said, moving restlessly in his chair. "Hang it, ma'am, do you hear?" he continued, looking irritably at his wife, "I wish I had taken my own line, and that is a fact."
"Then you wish you had been a fool, Mr. Northey!" the lady answered with fine contempt. "Do you think that this silly girl would rest content, or let us rest, until you had followed her dear brother Tom, and brought him back from his charmer? Not she! And for him, if you are thinking of him, he was always a rude cub, and bound for the dogs one day or other. What does it matter whether he is ruined before he is of age or after? Eh, Mr. Northey?"
"It matters to us," Mr. Northey answered.
"It may matter ten thousand to us, if we mind our own business," his wife answered coolly. "So do you let him be for a day or two."
"It matters as much to Sophia," he said, trying to find excuses for himself and his inaction.
"And why not? There will be so much the more to bind Coke to us."
"He has plenty now."