"Don't speak in that tone. If you dislike me, you can say so in warmer words, surely."
Fairlie smiled malgré lui.
"What a child you are, Geraldine! but a child that is a very mischievous coquette, and has learned a hundred tricks and agaceries of which my little friend of seven or eight knew nothing. I grant you were not a quarter so charming, but you were, I am afraid—more true."
Geraldine was ready to cry, but she was in a passion, nevertheless; such a hot and short-lived passion as all women of any spirit can go into on occasion, when they are unjustly suspected.
"If you choose to think so of me you may," she said, with immeasurable hauteur, sweeping away from him, her mauve ribbons fluttering disdainfully. "I, for one, shall not try to undeceive you."
The next night we all went up to a ball at the Vanes', to drink Rhenish, eat ices, quiz the women, flirt with the pretty ones in corners, lounge against doorways, criticise the feet in the waltzing as they passed us, and do, in fact, anything but what we went to do—dance—according to our custom in such scenes.
The Swan and her Cygnets looked very stunning; they "made up well," as ladies say when they cannot deny that another is good-looking, but qualify your admiration by an assurance that she is shockingly plain in the morning, and owes all to her milliner and maids. Geraldine, who, by the greatest stretch of scepticism, could not be supposed "made up," was bewitching, with her sunshiny enjoyment of everything, and her untiring waltzing, going for all the world like a spinning-top, only a top tires, and she did not. Belle, who made a principle of never dancing except under extreme coercion by a very pretty hostess, could not resist her, and Tom Gower, and Little Nell, and all the rest, not to mention half Norfolk, crowded round her; all except Fairlie, who leaned against the doorway, seeming to talk to her father or the members, or anybody near, but watching the young lady for all that, who flirted not a little, having in her mind the scene in the paddock of yesterday, and wishing, perhaps, to show him that if he did not admire her more than when she was eight, other men had better taste.
She managed to come near him towards the end of the evening, sending Belle to get her an ice.
"Well," she said, with a comical pitié d'elle-même, "do you dislike me so much that you don't mean to dance with me at all? Not a single waltz all night?"
"What time have you had to give me?" said Fairlie, coldly. "You have been surrounded all the evening."
"Of course I have. I am not so disagreeable to other gentlemen as I am to you. But I could have made time for you if you had only asked for it. At your own ball last week you engaged me beforehand for six waltzes."
Fairlie relented towards her. Despite her flirting, he thought she did not care for Belle after all.
"Well," he said, smiling, "will you give me one after supper?"
"You told me you shouldn't dance, Colonel Fairlie," said Katherine Vane, smiling.
"One can't tell what one mayn't do under temptation," said Fairlie, smiling too. "A man may change his mind, you know."
"Oh yes," cried Geraldine; "a man may change his mind, and we are expected to be eminently grateful to him for his condescension; but if we change our minds, how severely we are condemned for vacillation: 'So weak!' 'Just like women!' 'Never like the same thing two minutes, poor things!'"
"You don't like the same thing two minutes, Geraldine," laughed Fairlie; "so I dare say you speak feelingly."
"I changeable! I am constancy itself!"
"Are you? You know what the Italians say of 'ocche azzure'?"
"But I don't believe it, monsieur!" cried Geraldine:
"Blue eyes beat black fifty to seven,
For black's of hell, but blue's of heaven!"
"I beg your pardon, mademoiselle," laughed Fairlie:
"Done, by the odds, it is not true!
One devil's black, but scores are blue!"
He whirled her off into the circle in the midst of our laughter at their ready wit. Soon after he bid her good night, but he found time to whisper as he did so.
"You are more like my little Geraldine to-night!"
The look he got made him determine to make her his little Geraldine before much more time had passed. At least he drove us back to Norwich in what seemed very contented silence, for he smoked tranquilly, and let the horses go their own pace—two certain indications that a man has pleasant thoughts to accompany him.
I do not think he listened to Belle's, and Gower's, and my conversation, not even when Belle took his weed out of his mouth and announced the important fact: "Hardinge! my ten guineas, if you please. I've had a letter!"
"What! an answer? By Jove!"
"Of course, an answer. I tell you all the pretty women in the city will know my initials, and send after me. I only hope they will be pretty, and then one may have a good deal of fun. I was in at Greene's this morning having mock-turtle, and talking to Patty (she's not bad-looking, that little girl, only she drops her 'h's' so. I'm like that fellow—what's his name?—in the 'Peau de Chagrin:' I don't admire my loves in cotton prints), when she gave me the letter. I left it on my dressing-table, but you can see it to-morrow. It's a horrid red daubed-looking seal, and no crest; but that she mightn't use for fear of being found out, and the writing is disguised, but that it would be. She says she has the three requisites; but where's the woman that don't think herself Sappho and Galatea combined? And she was nineteen last March. Poor little devil! she little thinks how she'll be done. I'm to meet her on the Yarmouth road at two, and to look out for a lady standing by the first milestone. Shall we go, Tom? It may lead to something amusing, you know, though certainly it won't lead to marriage."
"Oh! we'll go, old fellow," said I. "Deuce take you, Belle! what a lucky fellow you are with the women."
"Luckier than I want to be," yawned Belle. "It's a horrid bore to be so set upon. One may have too much of a good thing, you know."
At two the day after, having refreshed ourselves with a light luncheon at Mrs. Greene's of lobster-salad and pale ale, Belle, Gower, and I buttoned our gloves and rode leisurely up the road.
"How my heart palpitates!" said Belle, stroking his moustaches with a bored air. "How can I tell, you know, but what I may be going to see the arbiter of my destiny? Men have been tricked into all sorts of tomfoolery by their compassionate feelings. And then—if she should squint or have a turn-up nose! Good Heavens, what a fearful idea! I've often wondered when I've seen men with ugly wives how they could have been cheated into taking 'em; they couldn't have done it in their senses, you know, nor yet with their eyes open. You may depend they took 'em to church in a state of coma from chloroform. 'Pon my word, I feel quite nervous. You don't think the girl will have a parson and a register hid behind the milestone, do you?"
"If she should, it won't be legal without a license, thanks to the fools who turn Hymen into a tax-gatherer, and won't let a fellow make love without he asks leave of the Archbishop of Canterbury," said Gower. "Hallo, Belle, here's the milestone, but where's the lady?"
"Virgin modesty makes her unpunctual," said Belle, putting up his eye-glass.
"Hang modesty!" swore Tom. "It's past two, and we left a good quarter of that salad uneaten. Confound her!"
"There are no signs of her," said I. "Did she tell you her dress, Belle?"
"Not a syllable about it; only mentioned a milestone, and one might have found a market-woman sitting on that."
"Hallo! here's something feminine. Oh, good gracious! this can't be it, it's got a brown stuff dress on, and a poke straw bonnet and a green veil. No, no, Belle. If you married her, that would be a case of chloroform."
But