“I should like to come every day if I could,” he replied.
He was falling very deeply in love; never had she looked so beautiful to him, and seeing her in his own familiar surroundings added to his infatuation. To keep her there always would be to locate heaven.
“Why do you say ‘if I could’? Cannot you do as you please?” she inquired, with a pout.
“Of course I can,” he said rather stiffly, thinking of Llewellyn. “Who is to prevent me? I shall come next week.”
She smiled archly. “On business for your father?” said she, playing with the geranium in her bodice.
“No; on business of my own.”
As Isoline sailed in to dinner on the arm of Mr. Fenton, she wished heartily that her aunt in Hereford could have seen her, and she took her place with a little air of deprecating languor; she was anxious to impress the servants with the fact that she had been waited on all her life, and that no genteel experience could be anything but stale. Afterwards, when dinner was over and she retired with Lady Harriet to the drawing-room, she felt herself for the first time unequal to the occasion, though she chatted away, helped by the elder woman’s efforts to put her at her ease. But both stifled a sigh of relief when the men came in.
It was a dull, solemn evening, she thought, though she enjoyed the rapture with which Harry turned over the leaves of her music as she sang. Her clear, thin voice sounded like a bird’s when she trilled her little operatic airs; it was true, too, which is more than can be said for many one has to listen to in drawing-rooms.
She got into the impressive four-poster in her panelled room, sighing to think that one of her evenings at Waterchurch was over, though, as far as actual enjoyment went, it had not been remarkable. But we follow ideas, not actualities—at least, those of us who have souls above the common.
She soon fell asleep, tired by the excitement of seeing new faces, and well satisfied with herself; but Harry sat up late in his room. It was long past midnight when he went to bed, and, when he did, he could not sleep for thinking of her.