Molly Bawn | Page 6

happen to you, and just while I was abusing you with all my might and main? I think I shall have to be very good to you to make up for it."
"I think so too," says Luttrell, gravely. "My ignominious breakdown was nothing in comparison with a harsh word thrown at me by you. I feel a deep sense of injury upon me."
"It all comes of our being in what the papers call 'poor circumstances,'" says Molly, lightly. "Now, when I marry and you come to see me, I shall send a carriage and a spirited pair of grays to meet you at the station. Think of that."
"I won't," says Luttrell; "because I don't believe I would care to see you at all when--you are married." Here, with a rashness unworthy of him, he presses, ever so gently, the slender fingers within his own. Instantly Miss Massereene, with a marked ignoring of the suggestion in his last speech, returns to her forgotten charge.
"I don't want to inconvenience you," she says, demurely, with downcast lids, "but when you have quite done with my hand I think I should like it again. You see it is awkward being without it, as it is the right one."
"I'm not proud," says Luttrell, modestly. "I will try to make myself content if you will give me the left one."
At this they both laugh merrily; and, believe me, when two people so laugh together, there is very little ice left to be broken.
"And are you really glad I have come?" says Luttrell, bending, the better to see into her pretty face. "It sounds so unlikely."
"When one is starving, even dry bread is acceptable," returns Molly, with a swift but cruel glance.
"I refuse to understand you. You surely do not mean----"
"I mean this, that you are not to lay too much stress on the fact of my having said----"
"Well, Luttrell, where are you, old fellow? I suppose you thought you were quite forgotten. Couldn't come a moment sooner,--what with Letitia's comments on your general appearance and my own comments on my tobacco's disappearance. However, here I am at last. Have you been lonely?"
"Not very," says Mr. Luttrell, sotto voce, his eyes fixed on Molly.
"It is John," whispers that young lady mysteriously. "Won't I catch it if he finds me out here so late without a shawl? I must run. Good-night,"--she moves away from him quickly, but before many steps have separated them turns again, and, with her fingers on her lips, breathes softly, kindly--"until to-morrow." After which she waves him a last faint adieu and disappears.
CHAPTER III.
"In my lady's chamber."
When John Massereene was seven years old his mother died. When he was seventeen his father had the imprudence to run away with the favorite daughter of a rich man,--which crime was never forgiven. Had there been the slightest excuse for her conduct it might have been otherwise, but in the eyes of her world there was none. That an Amherst of Herst Royal should be guilty of such a plebeian trick as "falling passionately in love" was bad enough, but to have her bestow that love upon a man at least eighteen years her senior, an Irishman, a mere engineer, with no money to speak of, with nothing on earth to recommend him beyond a handsome face, a charming manner, and a heart too warm ever to grow old, was not to be tolerated for a moment. And Eleanor Amherst, from the hour of her elopement, was virtually shrouded and laid within her grave so far as her own family was concerned.
Not that they need have hurried over her requiem, as the poor soul was practically laid there in the fourth year of her happy married life, dying of the same fever that had carried off her husband two days before, and leaving her three-year-old daughter in the care of her step-son.
At twenty-one, therefore, John Massereene found himself alone in the world, with about three hundred pounds a year and a small, tearful, clinging, forlorn child. Having followed his father's profession, more from a desire to gratify that father than from direct inclination, he found, when too late, that he neither liked it nor did it like him. He had, as he believed, a talent for farming; so that when, on the death of a distant relation, he found himself, when all was told, the possessor of seven hundred pounds a year, he bought Brooklyn, a modest place in one of the English shires, married his first love, and carried her and Molly home to it.
Once or twice in the early part of her life he had made an appeal to old Mr. Amherst, Molly's grandfather, on her behalf,--more from a sense of duty owing to her than from any desire to rid himself of the child,