“What a nuisance, this fellow’s turning up!” whispered Price angrily. “I shall have to fall back.”
Seymour and Miss Finche led the way. I did the elderly and protecting party.
“I place them in your charge,” were the parting words of mine host. “The youngsters will take value out of one another; you take value out of the whole lot.”
I dropped behind, and proceeded to enjoy the glories of the night in my own way. Soon came that entrancing blue light which steals in between day and dark, and the stars began to throb in the great canopy, and that “hush” which Night sends as her envoy to earth was passing over hill and hollow, and land and sea.
I sat down in a little nook on the cliff—a corner that seemed almost clean out of the world, and as if the earth had suddenly ended there. I thought over many things, and in the bizarre reflections consequent upon the adventures of the day came a dreamy sensation of admiration for the fair young girl whom destiny had thrown beneath the roof-tree of my friend Wilson Finche. I felt strangely interested in her already. Why, I did not ask myself. She was a blaze of intelligence, a mine of intellectual wealth. I do not mean for one second to say that she was a genius, but there was a tone of high culture about her that shed itself like a fragrant perfume.
Miss Finche appeared to me to be a very nice, ladylike, ordinary class of girl—one of those patent-mannered, warranted-to-go-well sort of young ladies who rove at their sweet wild will in the garden of society; but beside Miss Neville she was absolutely colorless.
I sat thinking over the strange freaks of fortune, that give thousands of dollars to some girls, leaving others without a dime, when the sound of approaching voices scattered my reverie to the night breeze that gently fanned my pepper and salt—too much salt—whiskers. I was in a hollow beneath the cliff. The speakers were Grey Seymour and Hattie Finche.
Miss Finche’s tone was cold and resolute.
“I do not love you, Mr. Seymour. I never could. I will not hold out a particle of hope.”
“Don’t say that, Hattie—anything but that. Hope is all I have to live for,” he cried in a quivering, agonized way that made me sad to hear.