‘Hush!’ exclaimed the girls in unison, and then they were silent.
Not long afterwards, they caught sight of two young men who were walking arm-in-arm along the sand, a couple of hundred yards away.
‘Look! There they are!’ whispered Lucy. ‘Aunt must not see them. We must go and warn them.’ And, stealthily accompanied by her cousin, she crept away from Miss Marrable, and ran towards the approaching figures.
I need not describe the greetings that ensued. Such things are the commonplaces of seaside encounters between young men and young women who have likings for each other, and they have been described a thousand times. Suffice it to say that, a few minutes later, Lucy and Robert were sitting together under the shadow of a bathing-machine, while Amy and Vivian were confidentially talking nonsense a dozen yards off. More than half an hour elapsed ere the girls returned to Miss Marrable; but fortunately the excellent spinster was still murmuring sleepily at the fly on her chin; and when she awoke, she had no suspicion that she had been deserted by her charges. As she walked back with them to the hotel, nevertheless, as if with a strange intuitive comprehension of danger in the air, she held forth to them upon her favourite topic—the unfathomable baseness of man; and gravely warned them against ever allowing themselves even for a single moment to entertain any feeling, save one of polite aversion to the hated sex.
Thus matters went on for a week or more, Lucy and Amy meeting their lovers every day in secret, and Miss Marrable suspecting nothing. Although she knew Sir Thomas Jellicoe and his son, she treated them, whenever she encountered them, with such freezing courtesy, that they did not seek her society. As for Robert Rhodes, she did not know him; and he therefore escaped her lofty slights.
But in due time a crisis arrived; and in order that the full bearings of the situation may be properly understood, I must briefly explain the characters of Miss Martha Marrable’s undutiful nieces.
Lucy Larkspur has but little romance in her composition; she has strong feelings, but not much sentiment; and she is one of those girls who are perfectly open with their hearts. She loved Robert Rhodes, and, as she knew quite well that he also loved her, she made no secret to him of her affection for him. Amy Allerton, on the other hand, is, and always has been, sentimentally inclined. She believes, rightly or wrongly, that it is a very charming thing to
Let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek;
and she would as soon have thought of permitting Vivian Jellicoe to think that she loved him, as of attempting to win and woo the Sultan of Turkey. The consequence was that Miss Marrable, who fondly imagined that she knew all the thoughts of her elder niece, trusted her much more than she trusted her younger. She regarded Lucy as an open book that might be easily read, and Amy as a kind of oracular voice that, while saying or appearing to say one thing, might mean exactly the opposite. Miss Marrable was destined to discover that she was to some extent wrong in her estimate, so far, at all events, as Lucy was concerned; and her discovery of her error was, I grieve to say, accompanied by a good deal of pain and mortification.