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“Then you had better look at yourself in the pond,” said Sophia, “for I assure you, you have a very serious face.”

He did not answer. He was watching the boy go round the paddock; and it was an odd thing, but for one moment, the sun striking full upon the small dark head, it seemed to him, and he could not have told why, that he could be watching two children instead of one. Then the pony broke into a trot, and the Captain shouted, and Willoughby shouted back, and it was gone.

A daughter followed three years after her brother, born in the winter at Combe Magna, in a snowstorm that shut up the roads for a week; and she was named Madeline, and had, from the first week of her life, the black hair and the quick eye and the wide, ready, unthinking smile of her father. Her father was lost. She was the first thing in his life that had ever been presented to him as a kind of reproach to his own past; and he could not look at her without a curious lifting of the heart, and a curious sinking under it, that he did not in the least examine.

It would have been hard, in all England, to have found a man more contented, or a household more thoroughly comfortable. They passed their winters in Somerset, and their springs in London, and their summers in the country again, and the seasons went round with the greatest regularity; and if there was, in some locked drawer of Mr. Willoughby’s mind, a small, hard thing that he never took out, it was nobody’s business but his own. It is even possible that by this time he had honestly forgotten where he had put the key.

Thus, while Combe Magna settled into the comfort of children, horses, polished silver, and sins carefully shut away, the quieter households of Delaford and Ashgrove were moving, by slower and more deliberate degrees, toward a very different trial. Margaret Dashwood had grown from the little sister who watched other people’s romances into a young woman expected, at last, to take her own place in the world; yet the place prepared for her was not simple. She had been taught, by Marianne’s danger, to distrust charm without principle; by Elinor’s happiness, to respect steadiness without display; and by Cecilia and the Aylmers, to imagine a life in which knowledge, travel, friendship, and love need not be enemies, though society was very ready to make them so.

Chapter VII.

Mrs. Dashwood arrived in London in the last week of February, with two trunks, a hatbox, a rosewood box lined with green baize, and a set of opinions on the subject of the metropolis which she had been forming, on and off, for the past twenty years, and which the metropolis, upon closer acquaintance, did nothing whatever to alter. She thought it too large. She thought it too loud. She thought the streets in the neighbourhood of Bedford Square remarkably clean, considering; and she took possession of the second-floor front of the Aylmers’ hired house, with a view of the plane trees, and prepared to be, for the whole of a London Season, chaperone to two young ladies at once.

It was not a charge she had ever expected to hold. Her eldest two daughters had neither had a London season. She had supposed, regretfully, when she first came to Barton Cottage, that a Season such as she herself had enjoyed in her youth, was a thing that happened to other people’s daughters, but would not be in her own family’s future; and she had supposed, more lately, that if it came at all, it would come in the ordinary way, with a great deal of fuss over gowns, and very little said about anything that mattered. She had not supposed that she should spend the whole of the coach journey to town being questioned, by a girl of eighteen, as to whether the British Museum kept its best specimens on public view, or only for persons who were introduced.

“Mamma,” said Margaret, upon the very step of the house in Bedford Square, with her bonnet already coming untied, “I have made Cecilia promise that we shall go to the Museum before a single ball. She says that it is a very odd way to begin a Season. I have told her that it is the only sensible way to begin anything.”

“You will go to the ball first,” said Mrs. Dashwood, “if I have to carry you there myself.”

Cecilia, coming up the steps behind them, interjected, “Margaret, your dear mother needs her rest after such a journey.”

“Thank you, Cecilia. I am glad one of you has the sense to know where her priorities must lie,” said Mrs. Dashwood.

“Indeed, Mrs. Dashwood,” Cecilia agreed before adding, “You must rest, for we have much before us these next few months. That is why I am sure Papa could be persuaded to escort us to the Museum.”

Margaret nodded enthusiastically and gave her friend a smile, while Mrs. Dashwood simply shook her head in defeat.

Mrs. Aylmer contentedly came up behind them on her husband’s arm and observed that it was a joy seeing their daughter share such an experience with a friend she was so entirely fond of.

It is a curious circumstance of our social machinery, and one for which no philosopher has yet offered a satisfactory account, that a young lady who cares nothing whatever for the usually exhausted opinion of a ballroom is, upon entering one, received as a wonder. This proved to be the case with Margaret Dashwood. She was presented as the daughter of a gentleman but with no fortune worth mentioning beyond what her father had left her, and it was generally supposed, in the first half-hour, that she would pass the Season much as a hundred other gentlemen’s daughters had passed it before her, and be soon forgotten. It was not what happened. She could talk with perfect ease, and no consciousness whatever of being remarkable, upon the age of the chalk under London, the habits of the ichthyosaurus, and the precise reason why a flint is not a chert; and society, having recovered from its first alarm at a young lady who appeared to have opinions, discovered that it could not have enough of her. She was, it was whispered, an original. She had a manner of looking one directly in the eye and saying what she thought, which the gentlemen of the ton had not often encountered in an unmarried woman of eighteen, and which they found, upon trial, to be highly agreeable.

She was presented at the second Drawing-room in May, in white satin and a set of ostrich feathers that made her sneeze, and it was universally allowed that she made a very tolerable curtsey. By the end of the second week she was, in the phrase of the season, “quite the rage;” and by the end of the third she had refused, with perfect good nature, a widowed baronet, a banker’s son, a captain of dragoons, and a young gentleman of nineteen who wrote poetry about her blue eyes. She did it without any effort. It was not that she despised them; she liked them all extremely and would have been sorry to see any one of them unhappy. It was only that they were all so exactly what she had expected. They talked of the same things; they were interested in the same people; they were delighted with the same jokes, and were all of them, in different degrees of ability, perfectly charming; and she stood in the midst of them, in a new white gown, at Lady Colville’s, at the Countess of Ardleigh’s, at the opera, with the feeling that she had been invited to a very good dinner in which every dish was a variety of the same pudding.

“I do not know what the matter with me is,” said she, late one night, in Cecilia’s room across the hall from her own, at the top of the house the Aylmers were renting for the season. “I ought to be happy. Everyone is so kind. Mamma is so pleased; you have seen her, when the flowers come, she goes about the house like a sultana. And I like them, Cecilia. I like every one of them. But I keep waiting for somebody to say something I did not expect.”

“You are who you are, Margaret Dashwood,” said Cecilia, sitting at her dressing table, examining her complexion. “I would expect nothing less from you than to be true to yourself.”

Margaret smiled, feeling relieved. “No one knows me so well as you do, my dearest friend. You have comforted me. I shall continue as I am until I find just the right person for me.”

“Of course, you will,” Cecilia agreed. “Or,” she added with emphasis, “you may be an old maid, and you will dig up Rome and be dreadfully happy.”

“I know that, too,” Margaret laughed. “I do not in the least mind it. Only — I should like to think it was an honest old maid, who had had the opportunity. I should like to be quite sure that I was not merely being obstinate.”

Cecilia, meanwhile, was managing the Season upon quite different principles. She had gone into it with her whole heart, and had informed her friend, upon the eve of the first ball, that she meant to dance every dance she was permitted, and to enjoy every one of them, and that anybody who found this a frivolous ambition might apply to her father for a lecture upon strata instead, since she herself had quite finished with the subject for the year. It was at Lady Colville’s, upon the ninth evening, that her ambition was, in every particular, realised.

She saw him first across the width of the room, over the shoulder of a very dull baronet who was telling her, at some length, about his hounds. He was tall, and fair, and beautifully dressed, in a coat that fitted him as though it had grown there; and he was laughing, at that moment, at something an older lady had said to him, with his head thrown back and the candlelight full on his face, in a manner so open and so entirely without self-consciousness that Cecilia lost the thread of the baronet’s hounds altogether. He looked up, still laughing, and his eye went round the room, as an eye will when a person feels himself watched, and found hers; and it seemed to her, though she was afterward unable to say why, that the laugh, for one instant, was for her alone.

He was brought up and presented within the quarter-hour, by a hostess who took a proprietary pride in the introduction, as though she had made the match herself and meant to be thanked for it. “Miss Aylmer, Mr. Wren.” He bowed. He had, close to, an open, handsome, good-humoured face, and a way of looking at a person as if she were the one thing in the room worth attending to; and when the next dance was called, and he asked for her hand, and she gave it, she was conscious of nothing whatever in the whole of that crowded ballroom except the particular warmth of his palm through her glove.

He danced beautifully. He danced, indeed, in a way that made every other partner she had had that Season seem to have been performing some duller and more mechanical exercise; and he talked the whole time, lightly, and easily, and very amusingly, asking her a dozen questions and appearing to attend to every answer as though it were the most interesting thing he had heard in a twelvemonth. He wished to know about Egypt. He wished to know whether it was true that she had once ridden a camel through a sandstorm, and laughed, delightedly, when she told him that it was, and that the camel had liked it a great deal less than she had. When the dance ended, he did not at once give up her hand.

“I am told a gentleman may only ask a lady twice,” said Mr. Wren, with a rueful look that did not in the least disguise how little he thought of the rule, “and that a third time sets the whole room talking. I find myself very strongly inclined to set the whole room talking, Miss Aylmer, but I am told it would not be kind to you; and so I shall content myself with a second and spend the rest of the evening in a state of considerable ill-usage.”

They danced the second. Cecilia, standing up with him for it, found herself possessed of the entirely unreasonable wish that the rules of propriety might be suspended for that one evening only, and that she might be permitted to dance with Mr. Wren, and with nobody else, for the whole of the night; and it was, she reflected afterward, the first wholly unreasonable wish she had ever had in her life, and she was rather glad to have had it.

“I am the assistant to nobody, and the heir to a good deal of dullness,” said he, when she asked him, laughing, what he did with himself. “My father is the Earl of Ashworth. It is not a title that comes with a second one to spare, more’s the pity, so I go about the world as plain Mr. Wren until he is good enough to die, which I hope will not be for a great many years yet, whatever the convenience to my address. He and my mother are excessively fond of the country and spend the better part of the year at Ashworth, in Wiltshire, being fond of it; and I am left the use of the house in Portman Square, and a great deal of London, which I find I do not care to leave.”

“And do you not care for the country?”