The Lovels of Arden | Page 6

sitting by the fire in the dingy little waiting-room, with
one elbow resting on the arm of her chair, her chin leaning on her hand,
and her eyes fixed thoughtfully upon a dull red chasm in the coals. She
had taken off her gray felt hat, and she looked older without it, the
traveller thought, in spite of her wealth of waving dark brown hair,
gathered into a great coil of plaits at the back of the graceful head.
Perhaps it was that thoughtful expression which made her look older
than she had seemed to him in the railway carriage, the gentleman
argued with himself; a very grave anxious expression for a girl's face.
She had indeed altogether the aspect of a woman, rather than of a girl
who had just escaped from boarding-school, and to whom the cares of
life must needs be unknown.
She was thinking so deeply, that she did not hear the opening of the
door, or her fellow-traveller's light footstep as he crossed the room. He
was standing on the opposite side of the fireplace, looking down at her,
before she was aware of his presence. Then she raised her head with a

start; and he saw her blush for the first time. "You must have been
absorbed in some profound meditation, Miss Lovel," he said lightly.
"I was thinking of the future."
"Meaning your own future. Why, at your age the future ought to be a
most radiant vision."
"Indeed it is not that. It is all clouds and darkness. I do not see that one
must needs be happy because one is young. There has been very little
happiness in my life yet awhile, only the dreary monotonous routine of
boarding-school."
"But all that is over now, and life is just beginning for you. I wish I
were eighteen instead of eight-and-twenty."
"Would you live your life over again?"
The traveller laughed.
"That's putting a home question," he said. "Well, perhaps not exactly
the same life, though it has not been a bad one. But I should like the
feeling of perfect youth, the sense of having one's full inheritance of
life lying at one's banker's, as it were, and being able to draw upon the
account a little recklessly, indifferent as to the waste of a year or two.
You see I have come to a period of existence in which a man has to
calculate his resources. If I do not find happiness within the next five
years, I am never likely to find it at all. At three-and-thirty a man has
done with a heart, in a moral and poetic sense, and begins to entertain
vague alarms on the subject of fatty degeneration."
Clarissa smiled faintly, as if the stranger's idle talk scarcely beguiled
her from her own thoughts.
"You said you had been at Arden," she began rather abruptly; "then you
must know papa."
"No, I have not the honour to know Mr. Lovel," with the same

embarrassed air which he had exhibited before in speaking of Arden
Court. "But I am acquainted--or I was acquainted, rather, for he and I
have not met for some time--with one member of your family, a Mr.
Austin Lovel."
"My brother," Clarissa said quickly, and with a sudden shadow upon
her face.
"Your brother; yes, I supposed as much."
"Poor Austin! It is very sad. Papa and he are ill friends. There was
some desperate quarrel between them a few years ago; I do not even
know what about; and Austin was turned out of doors, never to come
back any more. Papa told me nothing about it, though it was the
common talk at Holborough. It was only from a letter of my aunt's that
I learnt what had happened; and I am never to speak of Austin when I
go home, my aunt told me."
"Very hard lines," said the stranger, with a sympathetic air. "He was
wild, I suppose, in the usual way. Your brother was in a line regiment
when I knew him; but I think I heard afterwards that he had sold out,
and had dropped away from his old set, had emigrated, I believe, or
something of that kind exactly the thing I should do, if I found myself
in difficulties; turn backwoodsman, and wed some savage woman, who
should rear my dusky race, and whose kindred could put me in the way
to make my fortune by cattle-dealing; having done which, I should, of
course, discover that fifty years of Europe are worth more than a cycle
of Cathay, and should turn my steps homeward with a convenient
obliviousness upon the subject of the savage woman."
He spoke lightly, trying to win Clarissa from her sad thoughts, and with
the common masculine idea, that a little superficial