Confused by the question, Regina passed it over without notice. “I am Mrs. Farnaby’s adopted daughter,” she resumed. “I have been with her since I was a little girl—and yet she has never told me any of her secrets. Pray don’t suppose that I am tempting you to break faith with my aunt! I am quite incapable of such conduct as that.”
Amelius saw his way to a thoroughly commonplace compliment which possessed the charm of complete novelty so far as his experience was concerned. He would actually have told her that she was incapable of doing anything which was not perfectly becoming to a charming person, if she had only given him time! She was too eager in the pursuit of her own object to give him time. “I should like to know,” she went on, “whether my aunt has been influenced in any way by a dream that she had about you.”
Amelius started. “Has she told you of her dream?” he asked, with some appearance of alarm.
Regina blushed and hesitated, “My room is next to my aunt’s,” she explained. “We keep the door between us open. I am often in and out when she is disturbed in her sleep. She was talking in her sleep, and I heard your name—nothing more. Perhaps I ought not to have mentioned it? Perhaps I ought not to expect you to answer me?”
“There is no harm in my answering you,” said Amelius. “The dream really had something to do with her trusting me. You may not think quite so unfavourably of her conduct now you know that.”
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” Regina replied constrainedly. “If my aunt’s secrets have interested you—what right have I to object? I am sure I shall say nothing. Though I am not in my aunt’s confidence, nor in your confidence, you will find I can keep a secret.”
She folded up her gloves for the twentieth time at least, and gave Amelius his opportunity of retiring by rising from her chair. He made a last effort to recover the ground that he had lost, without betraying Mrs. Farnaby’s trust in him.
“I am sure you can keep a secret,” he said. “I should like to give you one of my secrets to keep—only I mustn’t take the liberty, I suppose, just yet?”
She new perfectly well what he wanted to say. Her heart began to quicken its beat; she was at a loss how to answer. After an awkward silence, she made an attempt to dismiss him. “Don’t let me detain you,” she said, “if you have any engagement.”
Amelius silently looked round him for his hat. On a table behind him a monthly magazine lay open, exhibiting one of those melancholy modern “illustrations” which present the English art of our day in its laziest and lowest state of degradation. A vacuous young giant, in flowing trousers, stood in a garden, and stared at a plump young giantess with enormous eyes and rotund hips, vacantly boring holes in the grass with the point of her parasol. Perfectly incapable of explaining itself, this imbecile production put its trust in the printer, whose charitable types helped it, at the bottom of the page, with the title of “Love at First Sight.” On those remarkable words Amelius seized, with the desperation of the drowning man, catching at the proverbial straw. They offered him a chance of pleading his cause, this time, with a happy indirectness of allusion at which not even a young lady’s susceptibility could take offence.