With a slight scream, she started up and caught her friend, who was tottering and like to fall in her arms. The old woman had been unable to receive this intelligence all at once. It was too appalling and too sudden; and when at last some intimation of it came home to her mind, she reeled under the shock. She uttered some incoherent words—"my charge of you," "your mother," "the future"—and then she sank quite insensible upon the sofa to which Annie Brunel had half-carried her.
CHAPTER XXIII.
HOME AGAIN.
Count Schönstein was in love. His ponderous hilarity had quite gone out of him. After Miss Brunel's departure, he moved about the house alone and disconsolate; he was querulous about his meals; he forgot to tell lies about the price of his wines. He ceased to joke about marriage; he became wonderfully polite to the people about him, and above all to Will Anerley; and every evening after dinner he was accustomed to sit and smoke silently in his chair, going over in his mind all the incidents of Annie Brunel's visit, and hoping that nothing had occurred to offend her.
Sometimes, in a fit of passionate longing, he wished he was again a tea-dealer and she the daughter of one of his clerks. He grew sick of his ambitious schemes; inwardly cursed the aristocracy of this and every other country; and prayed for some humble cottage, with Annie Brunel for his wife, and with nothing for himself to do but sit and smoke, and watch the grape-clusters over the verandah.
Twenty years before he had been afflicted by the same visions. They did not alter much his course of life then; nor did he permit them to move him much now—except after dinner, when most people become generously impulsive and talkative. In one of these moods he confessed to Will the passion which disturbed his repose.
Will stared at him, for the mere thought of such a thing seemed to him a sort of sacrilege; but the next moment he asked himself what right he had to resent the Count's affection for Annie Brunel as an insult, and then he was silent.
"Tell me, have I a chance?" said the Count.
"How can I tell you?" he replied.
"You were very friendly with her. You do not imagine there is anybody else in the young lady's graces?"