My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed.
I can watch you as one at a puppet-show. Tender is the tint of your cheeks, heavenly the azure of your eyes, snow-like your pearly teeth; but to me, my dear, you are no more than a cunning contrivance of beauty; the sweetest dummy, from which I can turn away with the lightest sigh, to think that I could ever have been so weak as to bestow a thought upon you.
She left us to seek her mamma, and then we got talking, as people not absolutely at their ease will talk—about the weather. Theresa was admirably lady-like in her manner to Mr. Curling. The poor fellow was a good deal embarrassed, but all things considered acquitted himself very tolerably.
My uncle watched his niece narrowly. He evidently wanted her good opinion for his son-in-law, and smiled with ghastly approval every time the young man spoke.
I caught Curling regarding her with great admiration, and even awe; which put me into the best possible temper with him, so pleased was I that he should see what a splendid substitute fortune had provided me with in the room of the young lady he had married.
The trying moment presently came, when my aunt stepped out of the house, followed by Conny. Theresa and I fell back with the instinctive horror of people of sensibility who apprehend a shock. However, nothing very disagreeable happened. There was something, indeed, unpleasantly chilling in the hard smile with which my aunt gave Curling her hand and in the hasty manner with which she withdrew it; but the effect, to us lookers-on at least, was somewhat qualified by the broad, nervous smile with which my uncle superintended the greeting.
As for Curling, his politeness was cringing. He smiled if his mother-in-law turned her head, listened with painful eagerness to be agreeable if she opened her mouth, agreed with her before he well knew what she had said, and in every respect showed himself thoroughly afraid of her.
“I don’t think he is going the right way to work to make her respect him,” I whispered to Theresa.
“Poor fellow!” she answered. “I wonder Conny had the heart to bring him here. I should be sorry to subject my husband to such treatment.”