the dark! The air is just raving about those roses. If you could not see them, you would still know they were there. I like an old-fashioned garden. Is that a ghost up against the buttress there, or is it another great sheaf of lilies? If I had such a garden as this, I should never care to go anywhere else.”
“My dear, I hope you will come here as often as you like,” said Mrs Mitford, with hospitable {81}warmth; and then she thought of the danger to John, and stopped short and felt a little confused. “The Huntleys are friends of yours, are not they?” she went on, faltering. “When you are with them, it will be so easy to run over here.”
{81}
“Oh, indeed, I should much rather come here at first hand, if you will have me,” said Kate, frankly. “I don’t think I am fond of the Huntleys. They are nice enough, but—— And, dear Mrs Mitford, I would rather go to you than to any one, you have been so good to me—that is, if you like me to come here.”
“My dear!” exclaimed Mrs Mitford, half touched, half troubled, “if I could think there was any amusement for you——”
“Whether there may be amusement or not, there must always be a welcome. I am sure, mother, that is what you meant to say,” said John, with a certain suppressed indignation in his tone, which went to his mother’s heart.
“Oh yes,” she said, more and more confused; “Miss Crediton knows that. If she can put up wi{82}th our quietness—if she does not mind the seclusion. We have not seen so much of the Huntleys as we ought to have seen lately, but when they are here——”
{82}
“I had much rather come when you were quite quiet. I love quiet,” said deceitful Kate, putting her face so close to her friend’s shoulder as almost to touch it in a caressing way she had. Mrs Mitford trembled with a presentiment of terror, and yet she could not resist the soft half-caress.
“My dear child!” she cried, pressing Kate’s arm to her side. And John loomed over them both, a tall shadow, with a face which beamed through the darkness; they looked both so little beside him—soft creatures, shadowy, with wavy uncertain outlines, melting into the dark, not clear and black and well defined like himself—moving softly, with a faint rustle in the air, which might almost have been wings. His mother and—— what was Kate to him? Nothing—a stranger—a being from a different sphere; yet, at the same time, the one creature in all the world upon whom he had a
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