He was kind and polite enough, no doubt, and he distributed his attentions in the most impartial manner--even including two young lady visitors to whom he was introduced; but Nan seized an early opportunity of slipping away to her own room, where she resumed certain very serious studies that occupied her mind at this time. When she came downstairs again Lieutenant King was gone.
On the following day her holiday ended, and she went down to Brighton. Many a time she thought of the ball, and always with a pleasurable recollection. When, however, she happened to think of Frank King--and it was seldom--it was always with a slight touch of disappointment. No doubt his leave was extended; probably he was still in town, and repeating those afternoon calls in Bruton Street. As for Nan, she honestly did not care to which train of admirers he might attach himself--whether he was to be Mary's captive or Edith's slave. But she was disappointed.
'I did think he was a little bit different from the others,' she would say to herself; and then she would turn to Mr. Lockyer's last discoveries in spectrum analysis.
'Nan, do you see that ship out there?' said Mary Beresford.
'I saw it as I came along,' said Nan. This was the afternoon on which she had fallen in with Singing Sal. Nan was rather tired after her long walk, and was not inclined to show much interest in that now lessening vessel, which was slowly sinking into the dusk of the west.
'Do you know what her name is?' said Mary Beresford, still regarding her younger sister.
'No,' said Nan. 'I heard people say she was a man-of-war.'
'Oh, indeed,' said Nan, with no greater interest than before.
'And Lieutenant King has just called here,' the elder sister said, pointedly.
'Oh, indeed,' said Nan. 'I wish I had been in; I should like to have seen him in uniform.'
That was all she said, and all she thought; for now there were far more serious things than ballrooms and young lieutenants occupying Nan's attention. She and her sisters were going abroad--she for the first time; and she was busy with foreign languages, and lives of the great painters, and catalogues, and guide-books, and dressing-cases. The world she hoped to plunge into on the following week was, in her imagination, composed of nothing but cathedrals and picture-galleries; and she could have wished that the picture-galleries might contain nothing but the labours of Botticelli and Andrea del Sarto. The clear ethereal beauty and tenderness of the one, the solemn thoughtfulness of the other: these were things that filled her mind with a mysterious gladness, as if something had been added to her own life. Rubens she cordially hated. Of Titian she had as yet seen hardly anything.