'You refused my hand just now,' continued he. 'Of all the people here at Greshamsbury, you are the only one that has not wished me joy; the only one—'
'I do wish you joy; I will wish you joy: there is my hand,' and she frankly put out her ungloved hand. 'You are quite man enough to understand me: there is my hand; I trust you to use it only as it is meant to be used.'
He took it in his and pressed it cordially, as he might have done that of any other friend in such a case; and then—did not drop it as he should have done. He was not a St. Anthony, and it was most imprudent in Miss Thorne to subject him to such a temptation.
'Mary,' said he; 'dear Mary! dearest Mary! if you did but know how I love you!'
As he said this, holding Miss Thorne's hand, he stood on the pathway with his back towards the lawn and house, and, therefore, did not at first see his sister Augusta, who had just at that moment come upon them. Mary blushed up to her straw hat, and, with a quick jerk, recovered her hand. Augusta saw the motion, and Mary saw that Augusta had seen it.
From my tedious way of telling it, the reader will be led to imagine that the hand-squeezing had been protracted to a duration quite incompatible with any objection to such an arrangement on the part of the lady; but the fault is all mine: in no part hers. Were I possessed of a quick spasmodic style of narrative, I should have been able to include it all—Frank's misbehaviour, Mary's immediate anger, Augusta's arrival, and keen, Argus-eyed inspection, and then Mary's subsequent misery—in five words and half a dozen dashes and inverted commas. The thing should have been so told; for, to do Mary justice, she did not leave her hand in Frank's a moment longer than she could help herself.
Frank, feeling the hand withdrawn, and hearing, when it was too late, the step on the gravel, turned sharply round. 'Oh, it's you, is it, Augusta? Well, what do you want?'
Augusta was not naturally very ill-natured, seeing that in her veins the high De Courcy blood was somewhat tempered by an admixture of the Gresham attributes; nor was she predisposed to make her brother her enemy by publishing to the world any of his little tender peccadillos; but she could not but bethink herself of what her aunt had been saying as to the danger of any such encounters as that she had just now beheld; she could not but start at seeing her brother thus, on the very brink of the precipice of which the countess had specially forwarned her mother. She, Augusta, was, as she well knew, doing her duty
