‘Why?’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, aunt, what do you mean?’
‘I suppose you will marry, Cecilia. In fact, you must some day.’
The blood came back rather violently.
‘Don’t let us think of that, ma’am,’ she said, turning away her head.
‘You do not want to leave me, Cecilia?’
The two women looked into each other’s eyes, and the younger laid her hand on that of her companion. The other seized it convulsively, a spasm of pain crossing her features.
‘My little girl,’ she said; ‘my darling!’
In those days, endearments, now made ineffective by use and misuse, had some meaning. Young people addressed their elders as ‘ma’am’ and ‘sir,’ and equals, who were also intimates, employed much formality of speech. While this custom was an unquestionable bar to confidence between parents and children, it emphasized any approach made by such as had decided to depart from it; also, it bred strange mixtures. To address those of your acquaintance who had titles as ‘your lordship’ or ‘your ladyship’ was then no solecism. Women, in speaking to their husbands or their men friends, would either use their full formal names or dispense with prefix altogether; and Lady Eliza, whose years of friendship with Fullarton more than justified his Christian name on her tongue, called him ‘Fullarton,’ ‘Robert,’ or ‘Mr. Fullarton,’ with the same ease, while to him she was equally ‘your ladyship’ or ‘Eliza.’ Miss Hersey Robertson spoke to ‘Gilbert’ in the same breath in which she addressed ‘Mr. Speid.’
Though Cecilia called her adopted aunt ‘ma’am,’ there existed between them an intimacy due, not only to love, but to the quality of their respective natures. The expectancy of youth which had died so hard in Lady Eliza had been more nearly realized in the loyal and tender devotion of her adopted niece than in any other circumstance in life. There was so fine a sympathy in Cecilia, so great a faculty for seizing the innermost soul of things, that the pathos of her aunt’s character, its nobility, its foibles, its prejudices, its very absurdities, were seen by her through the clear light of an understanding love.
‘I suppose you have guessed why Mr. Crauford Fordyce has been here so much?’ said Lady Eliza in a few minutes. ‘You know his feelings, I am sure.’