Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/332

324 and then there comes a current of air throughout the passages. Lionel, I am not sure but I shall leave Deerham Court.”

Lionel leaned against the mantel-piece, a smile upon his face. He had completely recovered his good looks, scared away though they had been for a time by his illness. He was in deep mourning for Mrs. Verner. Decima looked up, surprised at Lady Verner’s last sentence.

“Leave Deerham Court, mamma! When you are so much attached to it!”

“I don’t dislike it,” acknowledged Lady Verner. “But it suited me better when we were living quietly, than it does now. If I could find a larger house with the same conveniences, and in an agreeable situation, I might leave this.”

Decima did not reply. She felt sure that her mother was attached to the house, and would never quit it. Her eyes said as much as they encountered Lionel’s.

“I wish my mother would leave Deerham Court!” he said aloud.

Lady Verner turned to him. “Why should you wish it, Lionel?”

“I wish you would leave it to come to me, mother. Verner’s Pride wants a mistress.”

“It will not find one in me,” said Lady Verner. “Were you an old man, Lionel, I might then come. Not as it is.”

“What difference can my age make?” asked he.

“Every difference,” said Lady Verner. “Were you an old man, you might not be thinking of getting married: as it is, you will be. Your wife will reign at Verner’s Pride, Lionel.”

Lionel made no answer.

“You will be marrying sometime, I suppose?” reiterated Lady Verner with emphasis.

“I suppose I shall be,” replied Lionel; and his eyes, as he spoke, involuntarily strayed to Lucy. She caught the look, and blushed vividly.

“How much of that do you intend to drink, Miss Lucy?” asked Lionel, as she sipped the tumbler of lemonade, at her elbow.

“Ever so many tumblers of it,” she answered. “Jan said I was to keep sipping it all day long. The water, going down slowly, heals the chest.”

“I believe if Jan told you to drink boiling water, you’d do it, Lucy,” cried Lady Verner. “You seem to fall in with all he says.”

“Because I like him, Lady Verner. Because I have faith in him: and if Jan prescribes a thing, I know that he has faith in it.”

“It is not displaying a refined taste, to like Jan,” observed Lady Verner, intending the words as a covert reprimand to Lucy.

But Lucy stood up for Jan. Even at the dread of openly disagreeing with Lady Verner, Lucy would not be unjust to one whom she deemed of sterling worth.

“I like Jan very much,” said she, resolutely, in her championship. “There’s nobody I like so well as Jan, Lady Verner.”

Lady Verner made a slight movement with her shoulders. It was almost as much as to say that Lucy was growing hopelessly incorrigible, like Jan. Lionel turned to Lucy.

“Nobody you like so well as Jan, did you say?”

Poor Lucy! If the look of Lionel, just before, had brought the hot blush to her cheek, that blush was nothing compared to the glowing crimson which mantled there now. She had not been thinking of one sort of liking when she so spoke of Jan: the words had come forth in the honest simplicity of her heart.

Did Lionel read the signs aright, as her eyes fell before his? Very probably. A smile stole over his lips.

“I do like Jan very much,” stammered Lucy, essaying to mend the matter. “I may like him, I suppose? There’s no harm in it.”

“Oh! no harm, certainly,” spoke Lady Verner, with a spice of irony. “I never thought Jan could be a favourite before. Not being fastidiously polished yourself, Lucy—forgive my saying it—you entertain, I conclude, a fellow feeling for Jan.”

Lucy—for Jan’s sake—would not be beaten.

“Don’t you think it is better to be like Jan, Lady Verner, than—than—like Dr. West, for instance?”

“In what way?” returned Lady Verner.

“Jan is so true,” debated Lucy, ignoring the question.

“And Dr. West was not, I suppose,” retorted Lady Verner. “He wrote false prescriptions, perhaps? Gave false advice?”

Lucy looked a little foolish.

“I will tell you the difference, as it seems to me, between Jan and other peop1e,” she said. “Jan is like a rough diamond—real within, unpolished without—but a genuine diamond withal. Many others are but the imitation stone—glittering outside, false within.”

Lionel was amused.

“Am I one of the false ones, Miss Lucy?”

She took the question literally.

“No; you are true,” she answered, shaking her head, and speaking with grave earnestness.

“Lucy, my dear, I would not espouse Jan’s cause so warmly, were I you,” advised Lady Verner. “It might be misconstrued.”

“How so?” simply asked Lucy.

“It might be thought that you—pray excuse the common vulgarity of the suggestion—were in love with Jan.”

“In love with Jan!” Lucy paused for a moment after the words, and then burst into a merry fit of laughter. “Oh, Lady Verner! I cannot fancy anybody falling in love with Jan. I don’t think he would know what to do.”

“I don’t think he would,” quietly replied Lady Verner.

A peal at the courtyard bell, and the letting down the steps of a carriage. Visitors for Lady Verner. They were shown to the drawing-room, and the servant came in.

“The Countess of Elmsley and Lady Mary, my lady.”

Lady Verner rose with alacrity. They were favourite friends of hers—nearly the only close friends she had made in her retirement.

“Lucy, you must not venture into the