BEAUTIFUL JULIA—AND MY LORD
on. Sophy suddenly hid behind her friend ("To save my pride, not her own," generous Julia explains—Sophy herself advances no such excuse), but she could see. She saw the rider's eye rest on Julia; did it rest in recognition? It almost seemed so; yet there was doubt. Julia blushed, but she forbore from smiling or from seeking to rouse his memory. Yet she was proud if he remembered her face from across the footlights. The young man, too—being but a young man—blushed a little as he gave the pretty girl by the gate such a glance as discreetly told her that he was of the same mind as herself about her looks. These silent interchanges of opinion on such matters are pleasant diversions as one plods the highway.
He was gone. Julia sighed in satisfied vanity. Sophy awoke to stern realities.
"Gracious!" she cried. "He must have come to lunch! They'll want a salad! "You'll be here tomorrow—do!" And she was off, up the drive, and round to her own regions at the back of the house.
"I believe his Lordship did remember my face," thought Julia as she wandered back to Woodbine Cottage.
But Sophy washed lettuces in her scullery—which, save for its base purposes, was a pleasant, airy apartment, looking out on a path that ran between yew hedges and led round from the lawn to the offices of the house. Diligently she washed, as Mrs. Smilker had taught her (whether rightly or not is nothing to the purpose here), but how many miles away was her mind? So far away from lettuces that it seemed in no way strange to look up and see Lord Dunstanbury and his dog on the path outside the window at which she had been performing her task. He began hastily:
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