What did St. John Rivers think of this earthly angel? I naturally
asked myself that question as I saw him turn to her and look at her;
and, as naturally, I sought the answer to the inquiry in his
countenance. He had already withdrawn his eye from the Peri, and
was looking at a humble tuft of daisies which grew by the wicket.
"A lovely evening, but late for you to be out alone," he said, as he
crushed the snowy heads of the closed flowers with his foot.
"Oh, I only came home from S-" (she mentioned the name of a large
town some twenty miles distant) "this afternoon. Papa told me you
had opened your school, and that the new mistress was come; and so I
put on my bonnet after tea, and ran up the valley to see her: this
is she?" pointing to me.
"It is," said St. John.
"Do you think you shall like Morton?" she asked of me, with a direct
and naive simplicity of tone and manner, pleasing, if child-like.
"I hope I shall. I have many inducements to do so."
"Did you find your scholars as attentive as you expected?"
"Quite."
"Do you like your house?"
"Very much."
"Have I furnished it nicely?"
"Very nicely, indeed."
"And made a good choice of an attendant for you in Alice Wood?"
"You have indeed. She is teachable and handy." (This then, I
thought, is Miss Oliver, the heiress; favoured, it seems, in the
gifts of fortune, as well as in those of nature! What happy
combination of the planets presided over her birth, I wonder?) "I shall come up and help you to teach sometimes," she added. "It
will be a change for me to visit you now and then; and I like a
change. Mr. Rivers, I have been SO gay during my stay at S-. Last
night, or rather this morning, I was dancing till two o'clock. The
-th regiment are stationed there since the riots; and the officers
are the most agreeable men in the world: they put all our young
knife-grinders and scissor merchants to shame."
It seemed to me that Mr. St. John's under lip protruded, and his
upper lip curled a moment. His mouth certainly looked a good deal
compressed, and the lower part of his face unusually stern and
square, as the laughing girl gave him this information. He lifted
his gaze, too, from the daisies, and turned it on her. An
unsmiling, a searching, a meaning gaze it was. She answered it with
a second laugh, and laughter well became her youth, her roses, her
dimples, her bright eyes.