THE hour for parting came. Of all the guests, Sir Thomas alone stayed at the house a guest for the night. Mr. and Mrs. Emlyn had their own carriage. Mrs. Braefield’s carriage came to the door for Mrs. Cameron and Lily.
Said Lily, impatiently and discourteously, “Who would not rather walk on such a night?” and she whispered to her aunt.
Mrs. Cameron, listening to the whisper and obedient to every whim of Lily’s, said, “You are too considerate, dear Mrs. Braefield; Lily prefers walking home; there is no chance of rain now.”
Kenelm followed the steps of the aunt and niece, and soon overtook them on the brook-side.
“A charming night, Mr. Chillingly,” said Mrs. Cameron.
“An English summer night; nothing like it in such parts of the world as I have visited. But, alas! of English summer nights there are but few.”
“You have travelled much abroad?”
“Much, no, a little; chiefly on foot.”
Lily hitherto had not said a word, and had been walking with downcast head. Now she looked up and said, in the mildest and most conciliatory of human voices,—
“You have been abroad;” then, with an acquiescence in the manners of the world which to him she had never yet manifested, she added his name, “Mr. Chillingly,” and went on, more familiarly. “What a breadth of meaning the word ‘abroad’ conveys! Away, afar from one’s self, from one’s everyday life. How I envy you! you have been abroad: so has Lion” (here drawing herself up), “I mean my guardian, Mr. Melville.”
“Certainly, I have been abroad, but afar from myself—never. It is an old saying,—all old sayings are true; most new sayings are false,—a man carries his native soil at the sole of his foot.”
Here the path somewhat narrowed. Mrs. Cameron went on first, Kenelm and Lily behind; she, of course, on the dry path, he on the dewy grass.
She stopped him. “You are walking in the wet, and with those thin shoes.” Lily moved instinctively away from the dry path.
Homely though that speech of Lily’s be, and absurd as said by a fragile girl to a gladiator like Kenelm, it lit up a whole world of womanhood: it showed all that undiscoverable land which was hidden to the learned Mr. Emlyn, all that land which an uncomprehended girl seizes and reigns over when she becomes wife and mother.
At that homely speech, and that impulsive movement, Kenelm halted, in a sort of dreaming maze. He turned timidly, “Can you forgive me for my rude words? I presumed to find fault with you.”
“And so justly. I have been thinking over all you said, and I feel you were so right; only I still do not quite understand what you meant by the quality for mortals which the fairy did not give to her changeling.”
“If I did not dare say it before, I should still less dare to say it now.”
“Do.” There was no longer the stamp of the foot, no longer the flash from her eyes, no longer the wilfulness which said, “I insist;”—
“Do;” soothingly, sweetly, imploringly.
Thus pushed to it, Kenelm plucked up courage, and not trusting himself to look at Lily, answered brusquely,—
“The quality desirable for men, but more essential to women in proportion as they are fairy-like, though the tritest thing possible, is good temper.”
Lily made a sudden bound from his side, and joined her aunt, walking through the wet grass.
When they reached the garden-gate, Kenelm advanced and opened it. Lily passed him by haughtily; they gained the cottage-door.
“I don’t ask you in at this hour,” said Mrs. Cameron. “It would be but a false compliment.”
Kenelm bowed and retreated. Lily left her aunt’s side, and came towards him, extending her hand.
“I shall consider your words, Mr. Chillingly,” she said, with a strangely majestic air. “At present I think you are not right. I am not ill-tempered; but—” here she paused, and then added with a loftiness of mien which, had she not been so exquisitely pretty, would have been rudeness—“in any case I forgive you.”
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