AT THE FALLS. 183
arrival. Cora had wandered out there to be
alone, and came upon him stretched on the
rock, lazily smoking and reading.
"I am really sorry to disturb you, " she said, as he rose; "you look so very comfortable."
"I suppose you are vexed enough with me for being here, when you came out on purpose to be alone. "
You can avenge yourself by hating me for making you get up; but you may smoke. "
"Does that mean I may stay?"
"If you wish. Indeed, we need not interfere with each other. Pray go on with your book. "
It is Tennyson, " he said. " I was reading Guinevere- shall I read to you?"
She nodded, and he read on to the close of the marvelous poem, which he made more charming than ever by his delightful voice. He closed the book, and sat looking across the waters, repeating half aloud the closing lines,
"Until she passed To where beyond these voices there is peace."
Straightway they fell to talking, and talked about all sorts of things for a long time, as people must talk who have kindred sympathies when the magnetic chord is touched.
The conversation was interrupted by an invasion, headed by May and two of her adorers, who had just arrived. May was in her gayest mood, and flirted abominably, first with one and then the other; and Cora, watching Mr. Wellesley, thought that he seemed annoyed. She wondered at May for her folly in playing with a man like that, for the sake of two such ordinary geese as Wentworth and Charley Thorne.
More people had arrived at the hotel, and the evening was quite a gay one; and Cora was forced, to oblige her aunt, to dance, and sing, and make herself agreeable. But she could not help watching Mr. Wellesley, and she saw that his eyes often wandered toward May, whatever he was doing, and she was confident that the little witch had sufficiently ensnared him in her spells to make it possible for her to tease him.
Before she went to sleep she tried to talk seriously to May; but she might as well have argued with a white butterfly as with the girl in her mood that night. She would only laugh and say absurd things, and clap her hands and crow when Cora hinted her suspicions in regard to Hugh Wellesley.
“Let me alone and don’t lecture,” cried she, laughing immoderately.
“But, really, you did not behave well tonight, May,” expostulated Cora.
“I can behave worse—I will, unless I am let alone," cried the witch. "Tease Hugh Wellesley- I? How jolly! Oh! you beautiful white goose you. Oh, delicious! Won't I?"
Even after they began to talk of other things, she would at intervals break into a mischievous laugh, and Cora feared that the ordinary luck of people who try to set their friends right had befallen her; that is, that she had done a great deal more harm than good by her interference.
The next morning she saw Wellesley and May walking up and down the long veranda, and May really looked serious; but half an hour after, she was flirting as badly as ever with Wentworth; and Mr. Wellesley looked prouder and more melancholy than usual; and it was the habitual gravity of his face which had first made it attractive to Cora.
So she made up her mind definitely that he was really in love with May, and she decided that May cared for him, but from that very fact was all the more inclined to tease and behave ill. Cora was deeply concerned; she felt certain that Wellesley was not a man to endure such treatment, and that if he once went away, May would be powerless to summon him back, however deep the wound he suffered might be.
So it fell out, from the sympathy she began to feel for him, that Cora treated him with much more cordiality than she often did men. She had a keener sense of justice than is usually supposed to fall to her sex, and she was really indignant with May for conducting herself as she did. But May was more utterly unmanageable than usual, and Mrs. Crofton permitted her to take her own way in a fashion that displeased Cora hugely; but nothing she could say or do had any effect, and she was all the more angry from the fact that, as a general thing, her law throughout ber whole circle of relatives was as blindly obeyed as ever those of a Persian satrap could have been.
May would have seasons of treating Willesley in the nicest possible manner; but she always made up for it by being extra wicked immediately after; and he bore with her caprices with a patience that Cora admired, and could not set down to weakness, as she would have done with almost any other man.
Her sympathy for him, her anger at seeing anybody unjustly treated, all combined to soften her so much that, unconsciously to herself, she grew into an intimate acquaintance with him, which would have astonished her greatly had she taken time to think about it.
She allowed him to see how womanly and gentle she was under her exterior of pride and indifference; she displayed to him her rare
