"I know I am going to like you. I can tell directly I can see a
person--can't I Arthur?" and, kissing her hand to Mrs. Meredith, Anna,
and the rector, too, she sprang into the carriage, and was whirled
rapidly away.
"Who is she?" Anna asked, and Mr. Leighton replied: "She is an orphan niece of Colonel Hetherton's, and a great heiress, I
believe, though I never paid much attention to the absurd stories told
concerning her wealth."
"You met in Europe?" Mrs. Meredith said, and he replied: "Yes, she has been quite an invalid, and has spent four years abroad,
where I accidentally met her. It was a very pleasant party, and I was
induced to join it, though I was with them in all not more than four
months."
He told this very rapidly, and an acute observer would have seen that
he did not care particularly to talk of Lucy Harcourt, with Anna for
an auditor. She was walking very demurely at his side, pondering in
her mind the circumstances which could have brought the rector and
Lucy Harcourt into such familiar relations as to warrant her calling
him Arthur and appear so delighted to see him.
"Can it be there was anything between them?" she thought, and her
heart began to harden against the innocent Lucy, at that very moment
chatting so pleasantly of her and of Arthur, too, replying to Mrs.
Hetherton, who suggested that Mr. Leighton would be more appropriate
for a clergyman.
"I shall say Arthur, for he told me I might that time we were in Rome.
I could not like him as well if I called him Mr. Leighton. Isn't he
splendid, though, in his gown, and wasn't his sermon grand?"
"What was the text?" asked Dr. Bellamy, mischievously, and, with a
toss of her golden curls and a merry twinkle of her eyes, Lucy
replied, "Simon, Simon, lovest thou me?"
Quick as a flash of lightning the hot blood mounted to the doctor's
face, while Fanny cast upon him a searching glance as if she would
read him through. Fanny Hetherton would have given much to know the
answer which Dr. Simon Bellamy mentally gave to that question, put by
one whom he had known but little more than three months. It was not
fair for Lucy to steal away all Fanny's beaux, as she surely had been
doing ever since her feet touched the soil of the New World, and truth
to tell, Fanny had borne it very well, until young Dr. Bellamy showed
signs of desertion. Then the spirit of resistance was roused, and she
watched her lover narrowly, gnashing her teeth sometimes when she saw
his ill-concealed admiration for her sprightly little cousin, who
could say and do with perfect impunity so many things which in another
would have been improper to the last degree. She was a tolerably
correct reader of human nature, and, from the moment she witnessed the
meeting between Lucy and the rector of St. Marks, she took courage,
for she readily guessed the channel in which her cousin's preference
ran. The rector, however, she could not read so well; but few men she
knew could withstand the fascinations of her cousin, backed as they
were, by the glamour of half a million; and, though her mother, and,
possibly, her father, too, would be shocked at the _mésalliance_ and
throw obstacles in the way, she was capable of removing them all, and
she would do it, too, sooner than lose the only man she had ever cared
for. These were Fanny's thoughts as she rode home from church that
Sunday afternoon, and, by the time Prospect Hill was reached, Lucy
Harcourt could not have desired a more powerful ally than she
possessed in the person of her resolute, strong-willed cousin.