"Mr. Gibson and I should be so delighted if you could have stopped to
dinner; but, of course, we cannot be so selfish as to ask you to stay
when we remember how your father would be left alone. We were saying
yesterday we wondered how he bore his solitude, poor old gentleman!"
Or, as soon as Roger came with his bunch of early roses, it was
desirable for Cynthia to go and rest in her own room, while Molly
had to accompany Mrs. Gibson on some improvised errand or call.
Still Roger, whose object was to give pleasure to Cynthia, and who
had, from his boyhood, been always certain of Mr. Gibson's friendly
regard, was slow to perceive that he was not wanted. If he did not
see Cynthia, that was his loss; at any rate, he heard how she was,
and left her some little thing which he believed she would like, and
was willing to risk the chance of his own gratification by calling
four or five times in the hope of seeing her once. At last there came
a day when Mrs. Gibson went beyond her usual negative snubbiness,
and when, in some unwonted fit of crossness, for she was a very
placid-tempered person in general, she was guilty of positive
rudeness.
Cynthia was very much better. Tonics had ministered to a mind
diseased, though she hated to acknowledge it; her pretty bloom and
much of her light-heartedness had come back, and there was no cause
remaining for anxiety. Mrs. Gibson was sitting at her embroidery
in the drawing-room, and the two girls were at the window, Cynthia
laughing at Molly's earnest endeavours to imitate the French accent
in which the former had been reading a page of Voltaire. For
the duty, or the farce, of settling to "improving reading" in
the mornings was still kept up, although Lord Hollingford, the
unconscious suggestor of the idea, had gone back to town without
making any of the efforts to see Molly again that Mrs. Gibson had
anticipated on the night of the ball. That Alnaschar vision had
fallen to the ground. It was as yet early morning; a delicious,
fresh, lovely June day, the air redolent with the scents of
flower-growth and bloom; and half the time the girls had been
ostensibly employed in the French reading they had been leaning out
of the open window trying to reach a cluster of climbing roses. They
had secured them at last, and the buds lay on Cynthia's lap, but many
of the petals had fallen off; so, though the perfume lingered about
the window-seat, the full beauty of the flowers had passed away. Mrs.
Gibson had once or twice reproved them for the merry noise they were
making, which hindered her in the business of counting the stitches
in her pattern; and she had set herself a certain quantity to do
that morning before going out, and was of that nature which attaches
infinite importance to fulfilling small resolutions, made about
indifferent trifles without any reason whatever.