A Canadian Heroine. Mrs. Harry Coghill
they can be paraded in so many words."
"Decidedly you must be very tired, or you would take the trouble to understand me better."
He put down his whip, to draw her cloak more closely round her, for the dewy night air was chill, but she pushed it away.
"I am quite warm, thank you. How long the road seems to-night! Shall we ever be at home?"
"We are almost there. See, that is your own acacia-tree."
"I am so glad. Don't turn up the lane. I can run up there perfectly well by myself."
"Indeed you will not. Sit still, if you please."
"How tiresome you are, Maurice! You treat me just as if I were a baby."
"Do I? A bad habit, I suppose. I will try to cure myself."
His tone was so quiet, so free from either ridicule or anger, that she grew more impatient still.
"Now pray do let me get out. I can see Mr. Leigh's light burning still, as well as mamma's. They must both be tired of waiting. Why does your father always sit up for you, Maurice? Is he afraid to trust you?"
"Lucia!" His tone was angry now, and silenced her. In another minute they stopped at the gate of the cottage.
Mrs. Costello had heard the sound of their wheels, and instantly opened the door. Lucia's half-formed intention of making some kind of apology for her petulance, had no time to ripen. Maurice helped her down without speaking, bade her good night, exchanged a word or two with her mother, and drove slowly away again.
Mother and daughter went in together to Lucia's room; but Mrs. Costello, noticing that her child looked pale and weary, left her almost immediately. Lucia instantly flew to the window. The farmhouse where Mr. Leigh and Maurice lived was so near that the lights in its different windows could be plainly distinguished. After a moment, the one which had been burning steadily as they passed the house, flickered suddenly, disappeared, and then, shone more brightly through the opening door.
"He is at home," said Lucia to herself. "Poor Maurice, how good he is! What on earth made me so cross?"
She continued to watch. Presently the light which had returned to the sitting-room vanished altogether, and a fainter gleam stole out from what she knew to be the window of Maurice's room. She said "Good-night" softly, as if he could hear her, dropped her curtain, and was soon fast asleep.
That night Mrs. Costello's lamp was extinguished long before Maurice's. Tired and dispirited, he had seated himself before his little writing-table, and given himself up to a dream of no pleasant kind. It was so completely the habit of his life to think of Lucia that it would have been strange if her image had not been prominent in his meditations; but to-night for the first time he tried to get rid of this image. He was used to her whims and changing moods, to her waywardness and occasional tyranny. When he was a boy they had often quarrelled, and taxed the efforts of his sister Alice, Lucia's inseparable friend, to reconcile them; but since his long absence at college, and, above all, since Alice's death, they had ceased to torment each other. The relations of master and pupil had been added to those of playfellows, and their intercourse had run on so smoothly that until to-night Maurice had never known his charge's full power to irritate him. Like most persons of steady and equable temperament, he felt deeply annoyed, even humiliated, by having been surprised into impatience and anger; he was doubly displeased with himself and with Lucia. Yet, as he thought of her his mood softened; she was only a child, and would be good to-morrow. But then she could not always be a child—a girl of sixteen ought to be beginning to be reasonable; and then she did not look such a child. He had been struck by that idea at one particular moment of this very evening. It was when he had returned to the ball-room at the close of the first quadrille, and had met Lucia walking up the room with Mr. Percy. They had been talking together with animation; Lucia was a little flushed, and looking more lovely than usual. Mr. Percy, for his part, appeared to have forgotten his cool, almost supercilious manner, and to be occupied more with her than with himself.
Maurice felt his cheek grow red as he recalled the picture. He moved impatiently, and in doing so, displaced some loose papers, which slipped to the ground. In stooping to gather them up, his hand touched a dead flower, which had fallen with them. It was Lucia's rose. He was just about to throw it down again, when his hand stopped. "She spoke of something different," he muttered; "are the old times coming to an end, I wonder? Times must change, I suppose." He sighed, and instead of throwing the rose away, he slipped it into an envelope and locked it into his desk.
CHAPTER III.
The Honourable Edward Percy was the younger son of the Earl of Lastingham, and might therefore be readily excused if he considered himself a person of some importance in a country where a baronetcy is the highest hereditary dignity, and where many of the existing "honourables" began life as country storekeepers or schoolmasters. It is true that in his own proper orbit, this luminary appeared but a star of small magnitude, his handsome person and agreeable qualities making slight compensation for a want of fortune which he had always considered a special hardship in his own case; regarding himself as admirably fitted by nature for spending money, and knowing by experience that his abilities were totally inadequate to saving it. His family was not rich; so far from it, indeed, that the great object of the Earl had been to marry his daughters like Harpagon's "sans dot," a task which was not yet satisfactorily accomplished; and all he had been able to do for his younger son, had been to use the very small political influence he possessed, to start him in life as an attaché.
So the young man had seen various Courts, and improved his French and German; and at nearly thirty years of age he had begun to think that it was time to take another step in life.
This idea was strengthened by a short conversation with his father. He had paid a visit to Lastingham with the double object of attending the marriage of one of his sisters, and of trying to persuade the Earl to pay some inconvenient debts. But the moment he mentioned, with due caution, this second reason for his arrival, he found it a hopeless cause. He represented that his income was small, and his prospects of advancement extremely slender.
"Marry," said the Earl.
"Thank you. I would rather not. I want to get rid of my incumbrances, not to increase them."
"Marry," repeated the Earl.
"But whom?" asked his son, staggered by this oracular response.
"Miss Drummond."
"She's fifty, at least."
"And has a hundred thousand pounds."
"She would not have me."
"You are growing modest."
"Not in that respect. She has refused half-a-dozen offers every season for the last twenty years."
"Miss Pelham?"
"What would be the use of that?"
"Family interest."
"Too many sons in the way."
"Lady Adeliza Weymouth?"
Percy made a slight grimace.
"She is a year older than I am, and has a red nose; otherwise——"
"You had better think of it, at any rate," said the Earl, "and try if she will have you. Depend upon it, a sensible marriage is the best thing for you."
On which advice the son had dutifully acted. Fortune favoured him so far as to give him opportunities of cultivating the good graces of Lady Adeliza, and matters appeared to be going on prosperously. It seemed, however, that either the gentleman found wooing in earnest to be a more fatiguing business than he had anticipated, or he thought that a short absence might increase the chances in his favour, for on the slightest possible pretence of being sent out by Government he started off one day for Canada.
Now, when Lord Lastingham