“What are you laughing at, De Lacy?” asked my companion.
“At myself, Westover,” I replied. “The truth is, your description is so like some one I have been long seeking, and would give both my hands to find, that, for a moment, you set my fancy wild with the idea that she and your cottage-girl might have been the same.”
“O, ho,” said Westover, with a laugh; “but if your love affair has been of long duration, this cannot be the same, for she seemed quite young—not more than seventeen or eighteen.”
“That might well be,” I answered; “and yet my love affair, as you call it, might date from twelve years ago. The person I seek is the companion of my youth, one who is now an emigrant like myself, and I much fear that she and her mother both, may be in some distress, while I have the power of relieving it, and know not where to find them.”
“Yours must be a strange, curious history,” said Captain Westover. “I wish, some dull evening, when you have nothing better to do, you would tell it me, point by point. I am fond of a dreamy talk with a man over his past times.”
“I should have thought there were attractions enough in the metropolis,” I answered, “to occupy all the time of you men of fashion, in other ways than that.”
“Attractions,” replied Captain Westover, “which either leave no remembrance, or a sting. Take my word for it, De Lacy, there are multitudes of us who would gladly leave wax candles to blaze, and champagne to sparkle, and bright eyes—with no heart behind them—to shine, in order to sit beneath a shaded lamp with a man of real action, who has seen something of different countries, and a different world, and a different life from ourselves, and listen to tales of the heart’s realities, while all else around us is but the tinseled pageantry of a dream. Come, when shall it be, De Lacy?”
“To-night, if you will,” I answered; “we are certain of being uninterrupted.”
“But the old man,” he said. “Young men can never talk with open hearts before old ones. There is a power in age which controls us even when there is no real authority.”
“O, he goes to bed always at nine,” I said; and so we arranged it should be, and so it was.