as a sudden, sweet suggestion which turned to him all at once the brighter side of life. “I think we have rather supposed that amusement was unnecessary—that it was better, perhaps, not to be happy. I don’t know. In England, I suspect, many people think that.”

{90}

{90}

“But you are happy—you must be happy,” said Kate. “What! with this nice house, and such a nice dear mother—and Dr Mitford too, I mean, of course—and just come from the university, which all the men pretend to like so much. I do not believe you have not been happy, Mr John.”

“I am very happy now,” said John Mitford, with a dawning faculty for saying pretty things of which he had been himself totally unconscious. He did not mean it as a compliment; and when Kate gave the faintest little shrug of her pretty shoulders, he was bewildered and discouraged. The words were commonplace enough to her, and they were not commonplace but utterly original to him. He was happy, and it was she who had made him so. It never occurred to the young man that any fool could say as much, it was so simply, fully true in his case. And he sat and glowed upon her with his new-kindled eyes. Yes, it was true what she said—she was a stranger, and yet she belonged to them; or rather, she belonged to him. He might not be worthy of it. He had done nothing to deserve it, and yet through him her life had come back to her. He{91} had saved her. He was related to her as no man else in the world was. Her life had been lost, and he had given it back. His mind was so full of this exulting thought that he forgot to say anything; and as for Kate, she had to let him gaze at her, with amusement at first, then with a blush, and with a movement of impatience at the last.

{91}

“Mr John,” she said, turning her head away, and taking up a book to screen her, “I am sure you don’t mean to be disagreeable; but—did you never—see—a girl before?”

“Good heavens! what a brute I am!” cried poor John; and then he added humbly, “no, Miss Crediton, I never saw—any one—before.”

Upon which Kate laughed, and he, taking courage, laughed too, withdrawing his guilty eyes, and blazing red to his very hair. And when Mrs Mitford came back, she could not but think that on the whole they had made a great deal of progress. The two fathers were in the library for a long time over that charter, and Kate’s merry talk soon beguiled the yielding {92}mother. When the tea came, she sat apart and made it, and 

 Prev. P 39/135 next