“I may come to Tolldale soon, mayn’t I, Mr. Monckton?” she asked. “Dear Nelly, I do so long to see her! But to think of her being married to you! I never was so surprised in my life. Why you must be old enough to be her father. It does seem so funny!”
Gilbert Monckton did not feel particularly grateful to his ward for the extreme candour of these remarks, but he invited the young lady to spend the following day with Eleanor.
“I shall be in town to-morrow,” he said, “and I dare say Mrs. Monckton will find the Priory dull.”
“Mrs. Monckton!” cried Laura; “oh, to be sure; why, that’s Nelly, of course! Find the Priory dull? Yes, I should think she would indeed! Poor Eleanor, in those damp, over-grown gardens, with the high walls all round, and the tops of the trees above the walls. How lonely she’ll be.”
“Lonely! I shall come home to dinner every day.”
“Yes, at seven o’clock; and from breakfast-time till seven poor Nell must amuse herself in the best way she can. But I’m not going to grumble; I’m only too happy to think she will be near me.”
Mr. Monckton stood by the garden-gate—that gate near which he had so often loitered with Eleanor—listening with no very great satisfaction to his ward’s frivolous prattle. His young wife would feel unhappy in the dulness of her new life, perhaps. If that were to be so, it would be proof positive that she did not love him. He could never have felt dull or lonely in her society, though Tolldale had been some grim and isolated habitation in the middle of an African desert.
“So you think she will be dull, Laura?” he said, rather despondently.
“Why of course she will,” answered the young lady; “but now don’t think me inquisitive, please,” she added, in a very insinuating tone, “but I do so much want you to tell me something.”
“You want me to tell you what?” asked the lawyer, rather sharply.
Laura linked her hand through his arm, and raising herself on tip-toe, so as to bring her rosy lips within easier reach of his ear, whispered archly,
“Does she really love you? Was it really a love-match?”
Gilbert Monckton started as violently as if that infantine whisper had been the envenomed hiss of a snake.
“What do you mean, child?” he said, turning sharply upon his ward; “of course Eleanor and I married because we loved each other? Why else should we have married?”
“No, to be sure. Girls marry for money sometimes. I heard Mrs. Darrell say that one of the Penwoods, of Windsor, married a horrid, old, rich city man for the sake of his money. But I don’t think Eleanor would do that sort of thing. Only it seems so funny that she should have been in love with you all the time.”
“All what time?”
“Why all the time she and I were together. How could she help talking of you, I wonder?”
The lawyer bit his lip.
“She never talked of me, then?” he said, with a feeble attempt to make his tone careless.
“Oh, yes, she spoke of you sometimes, of course; but not in that way.”
“Not in what way? When will you learn to express yourself clearly, Miss Mason? Are you going to be a child all your life?”
Gilbert Monckton’s ward looked up at him with a half comic look of terror. He was not accustomed to speak so sharply to her.
“Don’t be angry, please,” she said, “I know I don’t always express myself clearly. I dare say it’s because I used to get other girls to do my themes—they call exercises in composition themes, you know—when I was at school. I mean that Eleanor didn’t talk of you as if she was in love with you—not as I talk—not as I should talk of any one if I were in love with them,” added the young lady, blushing very much as she corrected herself.
Miss Mason had only one idea of the outer evidences of the master-passion. A secret or unrequited affection which did not make itself known by copious quotations of Percy Shelley and Letitia Landon, was in her mind a very common-place affair.
Mr. Monckton shrugged his shoulders.
“Who set you up as a judge of how a woman should speak of a man she loves?” he said, sharply. “My wife has too much modesty to advertise her affection for any man. By-the-bye, Miss Mason, would you like to come and live at Tolldale?”
Laura looked at her guardian with unmitigated surprise.
“Come and live at Tolldale!” she said; “I thought you didn’t like me; I thought you despised me because I’m so frivolous and childish.”
“Despise you, Laura,” cried Gilbert Monckton, “not like you! My poor dear child, what a brute I must have been if I ever have given you such an impression as that. I am very fond of you, my dear,” he added, gravely, laying his hand upon the girl’s head as he spoke, and looking down at her with sorrowful tenderness. “I am very much attached to you, my poor dear child. If I ever seem vexed with your girlish frivolity, it is only because I am anxious about your future. I am very, very anxious about your future.”
“But why are you so anxious?”
“Because your mother was childish and light-hearted like you, Laura, and her life was not a happy one.”
“My poor mother. Ah, how I wish you would tell me about her.”
Laura Mason looked very serious as she said this. Her hands were folded round the lawyer’s arm, her bright blue eyes seemed to grow of a more sombre colour as she looked earnestly upward to his grave face.
“Not now, my dear; some day, some day, perhaps, we’ll talk about all that. But not now. You haven’t answered my question, Laura. Would you like to live at Tolldale?”
The young lady blushed crimson and dropped her eyelids.
“I should dearly like to live with Eleanor,” she said. “But—”
