"You're a famous pedestrian in these days, Thorpe," I said, rising with a trifle of embarrassment from my seat as close to Miss Lenox's as the rocks permitted, "and an early riser too. When I got up this morning at half-past six I told myself that I should see nobody for three hours at least, yet both Miss Lenox and you equal me in my love for the early morning hours."
But Thorpe was indifferent, and I saw at once that his mind was too preoccupied to allow of his wasting a thought upon the reason of my rising earlier than usual. "If you got up at half-past six," said he coolly, looking at his watch, "you must be ready for your breakfast, for it is a quarter to nine."
"I shall go in," remarked Georgy, rising and shaking out her white skirts and putting herself to rights generally after the manner in which birds and women plume themselves. "Did you come to breakfast, Mr. Thorpe?" she inquired with bare civility.
"I thought of dropping in," he returned; and as I assisted Miss Lenox up the ledge I turned to see if he were following us. He seemed to be waiting, however, for us to get away, and when I gained another distant glimpse of him he was apparently searching for something in a crevice of the rocks. Yet we were scarcely on the back piazza, before he had rejoined us in high spirits, and I was conscious of a gleam in his eyes which I had never seen before.
I could not resist speculations upon the reasons of his intimacy at the house, but dismissed them all as idle, for I knew very well that the habits of a young man at a watering-place are made by the necessity of filling up the hours of the day with occupation. The cottagers have perfect leisure as a rule, and with amiable, courteous ways press upon all acquaintances an incessant hospitality; and Thorpe, always frivolous, had at once fallen into the general way. Here at The Headlands the house was still under the shadow of deep mourning, but his old acquaintance with Mr. Floyd and my mother made his frequent visits admissible. At any rate, beyond Mr. Floyd's unobtrusive sarcasm at his expense, I heard no objections to Thorpe's dropping in to breakfast. Mills brought him a plate, and he himself chose a seat at Helen's left hand, and devoted himself to her service in a way that I knew bored her immeasurably. He sugared her strawberries and creamed them generously, and she sent them to her parrot. "I will take some more strawberries, Mills," she said then, and treated Thorpe's further attempts to serve her with chilly disdain.
"Now that Floyd is here," said Mr. Floyd when we were through breakfast, "I shall indulge in laziness no longer, but shall sit by and see him work." And the result was that for the next two weeks he and my mother, Helen and I, all sat in Mr. Raymond's study for an hour or two every morning and looked over his papers. Two or three times Mr. Wickham the lawyer came from New York, and it was easy enough to see that Helen's property was so large, its investments so various, that its proper care was work enough for one man.
"I shall look about for a husband for her at once," Mr. Floyd said half a dozen times to the lawyer when we three men were alone: "nobody can expect me to waste my few energies in looking after all these interests."
"Depend upon it, sir," Mr. Wickham would return with an easy chuckle, "you will find the world full of young men who will be happy to relieve you of every responsibility regarding Miss Floyd's fortune."
"They shall none of them have her," her father exclaimed once, fiercely—"not one! No man but one who loves her for her sweet self alone shall ever have my little girl." At such times Mr. Wickham always looked at me with a critical curiosity which I could forgive in so old a friend of Helen's, but which at the same time robbed me of a certain composure I should have liked to carry through the difficulties of my present position. For I was, in truth, performing all the duties of an executor and mastering the details of the schedule of property, while Mr. Floyd sat by and made jokes upon the way Helen would spend her income.