“I have found out one thing since I came to see you, Miss Eden,” he said, “and it is that you are singularly frank. One effect of that is to make me wish to be frank with you. Now I am going to confess that I came today with some misgivings. I remembered, my dear child, the circumstances of your birth and bringing up, and could not help fearing that your brother had been a little blinded by his feelings, and had seen a little more in you than you possessed. But I do not wonder now at what he said of you. If your father had lived till now I think that he would have been proud of his child, and yet he was a fastidious man.”
“Thank you, Mr. Travers; but you, perhaps, think all that because I am—because you think I am pretty.”
Mr. Travers smiled. “Well, your prettiness is a part of you—an appropriate part, I think, but only a part after all. You see I am not afraid of spoiling you. You are strangely like your father; in the shape of your face, the colour of your eyes, and in your voice you are like him.”
She was looking up at him, drinking in his words with eager pleasure.
“I see that you like to hear about him,” he said, taking her hand. “But all I have to tell you must be put off until we meet at Kingston. I am only sorry that you will find no young people there. My sons and daughters are all married and away. I have some grandchildren as old as you are, and they are often with us, but at present Mrs. Travers is alone.”
After a few more words, he bade her good-bye and left her, and only after he had gone Fan remembered that she had intended to confess to him, among other things, that she had been extravagant with somebody's money.
CHAPTER XXXVI
The lawyer's visit had given her something to think of and to do; forthwith she began to prepare for her fortnight's stay at Kingston with much zeal and energy. It was a great deal to her to be able to look forward to the companionship for a short time of even an elderly, perhaps very dignified, lady, her loneliness did so weigh upon her. It had not so weighed before; she had had her daily occupations, the companionship of her fellow-assistants, and had always felt tired and glad to rest in the evening. Now that this strange new life had come to her, that the days were empty yet her heart full, to be so completely cut off from her fellows and thrown back on herself, to have not one sympathetic friend among all these multitudes around her, appeared unnatural, and made all the good things she possessed seem almost a vanity and a delusion.